iPhone Safari Web App opens links in new window

Question

I have problem with web after adding icon to Home Screen. If the web is launched from Home Screen, all links will open in new window in Safari (and lose full screen functionality). How can I prevent it? I couldn't find any help, only the same unanswered question.

Answer 1

This is what worked for me on iOS 6 (very slight adaptation of rmarscher's answer):

<script>                                                                
    (function(document,navigator,standalone) {                          
        if (standalone in navigator && navigator[standalone]) {         
            var curnode,location=document.location,stop=/^(a|html)$/i;  
            document.addEventListener("click", function(e) {            
                curnode=e.target;                                       
                while (!stop.test(curnode.nodeName)) {                  
                    curnode=curnode.parentNode;                         
                }                                                       
                if ("href" in curnode && (curnode.href.indexOf("http") || ~curnode.href.indexOf(location.host)) && curnode.target == false) {
                    e.preventDefault();                                 
                    location.href=curnode.href                          
                }                                                       
            },false);                                                   
        }                                                               
    })(document,window.navigator,"standalone")                          
</script>

Answer 2

If using jQuery Mobile you will experience the new window when using the data-ajax='false' attribute. In fact, this will happen whenever ajaxEnabled is turned off, being by and external link, by a $.mobile.ajaxEnabled setting or by having a target='' attribute.

You may fix it using this:

$("a[data-ajax='false']").live("click", function(event){
  if (this.href) {
    event.preventDefault();
    location.href=this.href;
    return false;
  }
});

(Thanks to Richard Poole for the live() method - wasn't working with bind())

If you've turned ajaxEnabled off globally, you will need to drop the [data-ajax='false'].

This took me rather long to figure out as I was expecting it to be a jQuery Mobile specific problem where in fact it was the Ajax linking that actually prohibited the new window.

Answer 3

One workaround i used for an iOS web app was that I made all links (which were buttons by CSS) form submit buttons. So I opened a form which posted to the destination link, then input type="submit" Not the best way, but it's what I figured out before I found this page.

Answer 4

You can simply remove this meta tag.

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

Answer 5

This is an old question and many of the solutions here are using javascript. Since then, iOS 11.3 has been released and you can now use the scope member. The scope member is a URL like "/" where all paths under that scope will not open a new page.

The scope member is a string that represents the navigation scope of this web application's application context.

Here is my example:

{
  "name": "Test",
  "short_name": "Test",
  "lang": "en-US",
  "start_url": "/",
  "scope": "/",
  ...
}

You can also read more about it here. I also recommend using the generator which will provide this functionality.

If you specify the scope, everything works as expected similar to Android, destinations out of the scope will open in Safari — with a back button (the small one in the status bar) to your PWA.

Answer 6

I created a bower installable package out of @rmarscher's answer which can be found here:

http://github.com/stylr/iosweblinks

You can easily install the snippet with bower using bower install --save iosweblinks