Android Web App : Position:fixed broken?

Question

Hi all,

I'm in the process of developping a Web Application for mobiles. I went with web applications because to me it seems a winning situation having to develop one application that could run also on iPhone / Windows Mobile / Palm etc.

I started testing today after a few days of doing concepts, ideas and designs and what I wanted to do was have a menu that sticks at the bottom of the page. Exactly like the menu on the bottom in this iPhone application screenshot : http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3094/2656904921_1c54e93b4f.jpg

Using CSS, I though it would be really easy to do this. Only using position:fixed; bottom:0; would have done the trick but I have found it doesn't behave the same on mobile browsers

I tried to split my page in 2 sections : 1 would be a scrollable div (for the content) and the other one would be the bottom menu. Scrollable divs also do not work on Android. I also tried using frames with no luck either. Does anyone know of any way to re-create a menu that would stick to the bottom of a page for mobile phones?

Thank you, Steven

Answer 1

This is supposed to work :) http://doctyper.com/archives/200808/fixed-positioning-on-mobile-safari/

Answer 2

Just got an upgrade to Android 2.2 (Froyo) on my HTC Desire, and I'm happy to say that position fixed now works, at least when you use the viewport meta tag to set initial-scale and width. Still doesn't seem to work on regular web pages though.

Answer 3

On my Android N1 with CyanogenMod i had this trouble too and the fix:

   <meta
     name="viewport"
     content="width=100%; 
             initial-scale=1;
             maximum-scale=1;
             minimum-scale=1; 
             user-scalable=no;"
    />

Specifically the user-scalable=no; part, you can also put 0 instead of no.

Interestingly this breaks androids rendering of buttons, but all you have to do is set a background color to buttons.