Why Did Facebook Remove Full Screen Photo Viewing From Safari? (UPDATED)

Posted March 30, 2012 at 2:52 am by Charlie Pryor in Facebook

Photos are likely the most popular Facebook feature right now, aside from mere status updates. The social network receives millions of photos each and every day from people all over the world sharing them with their friends and family.

One new feature Facebook recently lanched, was Full Screen Viewing for photos. The move made viewing photos more fun, and gave us all a chance to see them in HD, should our monitors allow it. We reported this change right as it happened, and since then, there have been other sites announcing that the only browsers that support such a feature, is Chrome and Firefox.

This is odd to me though, since Safari and Opera also worked for browsing photos in full screen when it was first launched. It worked well in every browser, including Apple’s Safari browser (version 5.1.4, Mac OS X 10.6.8).

So why then are these other sites claiming that the feature only works in Chrome and Firefox? Turns out, as of this post, Safari is actually no longer supported. The feature, which we DEMONSTRATED HERE, doesn’t appear to show up any longer in Safari when browsing photos, and because those other sites were a tad bit behind us on the news, they only seen what was available after Facebook removed the ability. It really does only support Chrome and Firefox now.

But why is this? Was there some unknown bug that I didn’t see when it launched? It seemed to work fine for me, and when another user on our Facebook page declared that she couldn’t get the feature to work with her in Chrome, I actually went and made another video demonstrating the feature being fully functional in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. It worked fine. (Please visit our Facebook Page to see in HD)

I don’t know if there is something in the coding that Facebook didn’t like, or if it’s just some sort of stance against Apple’s browser, but all of the browsers work fine with this viewing feature.

~~I’ve reached out to Facebook support for comment, but have yet to get a response~~

UPDATE: We’ve received a response from a member of the Facebook team who built the feature. His response is in the first comment below this post. Thank you for your response Pete!

For security reasons, Safari doesn’t allow keyboard input when in full-screen mode. So if you actually tried to type a comment into the comment box none of the keystrokes would register. So rather than ship a half-broken product to some users we decided to just release it to browsers that worked the best. We reported this bug to Apple and hopefully they’ll change their mind about this feature soon.

When Apple gets around to addressing this issue, those using Safari will get this feature back.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions in the comments below. It would be great if you came and hung out with thousands of others in HotTips! Community on Facebook. or Follow us on Twitter. We love reading what you have to say!

facebook, photos, safari

About the Author

Charlie Pryor

Charlie is a technology nut, and an admirer of quality innovation and design. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Film and Video Production from Grand Valley State University, and is a media consultant and filmmaker. He founded HotTips! back in January 2010, and believes in openness and acceptance in consumer tech.

More articles by Charlie Pryor »

Craig Temple

Pete Hunt is either mistaken or this issue has been addressed as of Safari 6.0.2 (if not earlier). In Safari 6.0.2 (on 10.8.2), when I change the user agent to Chrome via the Developer menu in Safari (all that does is tell the website that you're using a different browser), Fullscreen works fine. Further, I can tag, like, comment, and page left/right just fine. There are no problems whatsoever with keyboard input while in Fullscreen. Make it happen Pete. If you've got code to block this feature from Safari, you can easily change it to only block on versions of Safari that don't support it, leaving it to work on the versions where it functions just fine. Cheers

Pete Hunt

I built this feature. For security reasons, Safari doesn't allow keyboard input when in full-screen mode. So if you actually tried to type a comment into the comment box none of the keystrokes would register. So rather than ship a half-broken product to some users we decided to just release it to browsers that worked the best. We reported this bug to Apple and hopefully they'll change their mind about this feature soon. Nice tutorials!

Hugh Howlett

I'm sure. Well if Apple have addressed the issue for v6 dev preview perhaps the feature could be enabled for v6.0 upwards. Looking forward to it none the less.

Pete Hunt

Black Z Eddie You can comment by clicking on the counts in the lower right which exposes the right hand column

Pete Hunt

It's hard to get the messaging right, though

Hugh Howlett

That's good reasoning behind Safari not having the feature, but i'd much prefer that half broken product than not at all. :)

Black Z Eddie

Pete, sorry, makes no sense. When in fullscreen mode, you can't type comments anyway. The only thing you would lose by not having keyboard input is not being able to exit fullscreen by pressing Esc; or using the arrow keys to move to the next/prev pics. But, the mouse/pad is functional to do those tasks.

Scott E. Petersen

My question is, why doesn't full screen viewing work for me in Firefox with the latest version running? And one more, in Chrome, I now have to hit "Ctrl + -" three times for a full screen image to actually fit the screen, otherwise it is so blown up I have to scroll to see it. Then, I have to "Ctrl + +" three times for other content to fit on my screen and have text be large enough to read. Thanks in advance if you are able to answer this. :)

Ani Crotophaga

All these "Facebook" games don't allow keyboard input in fullscreen mode, but yet they are supported. Isn't that is a half broken product. Why don't they release the feature as it's done in the games, switch back if the keyboard is used. I wouldn't mind that...