Shouldn't window.screen.width/height correspond to actual screen width/height?

Question

Toying around with the WebKit browser in the new Kindle 3G, I noticed that window.screen.width and window.screen.height don't reflect the actual screen dimensions. The physical screen (or rather, paper) dimensions are 800 x 600. I get:

• 800 x 506 in landscape mode
• 600 x 706 in portrait mode

But interestingly, both Chrome and Safari (which are also WebKit) running on my desktop report the actual screen resolution.

According to MDC, these properties are not part of any specification, so there's probably no strict definition of what width/height should report. But, shouldn't it be expected that they reflect the actual screen dimensions?

Answer 1

It would seem that screen.availWidth and screen.width are both returning the availWidth all the time, on many mobile operating systems.

I was unable to find any documentation on this however I did tested Android 2.2 and got the screen size minus the top menu bar exactly no matter what a requested.

Answer 2

I think WebKit can do nothing if it's getting wrong values from system. Sure these values should be represented by screen.availWidth and screen.availHeight, but I think this is related to event.screenX and event.screenY for mouse (pointer) positions.