WebKit supports interactive-widget … and hopefully Safari will too?

About a month ago, WebKit gained support for interactive-widget. While it’s not clear whether this will end up in Safari or not, this is pretty exciting news: If you have ever had a virtual keyboard obscure your fixed navigation bar, then interactive-widget is for you. This post details a quick recap of what the feature does, how we got here, and a sneak peek at it running in WebKit. ~ # The backstory: Interop 2022 Back in 2022, I did a lot of research into viewports as the lead of the Viewport Investigation Effort, part of Interop 2022. Screenshot of the Viewport Investigation Effort Demo Pages While that effort still hasn’t led to an actual Interop Proposal (due to the lack of proper mobile testing, something that is in the works ever since 2023 😏), one of the outcomes was that we at Chrome changed how viewports get resized when the virtual keyboard gets shown in Chrome on Android. ~ # Enter interactive-widget Where Chrome used to resize the layout viewport by default, its behavior…