I am currently working on a template for a webpage and I'm currently working on the responsiveness for it. I have the desktop version and the mobile phone versions working just fine. The problem that I'm having with it right now is I'm trying to make a version for tablets. The "tablet" I'm using right now is a surface pro which has a 96 dpi. My desktop has and older 1080 monitor. So when I open chrome up with dev tools on the surface the pixel width is the same or close to my desktop but is looking completely different. Text that is on a single line on the desktop is on two lines for the surface and not all is showing. The reason this is an issue is that this is the header of the page. At full width on the surface it's acting more like half width on the desktop. I thought it might be because the screen for the surface is higher DPI on the surface but not sure. Is this what is causing this and if so how do you fix it. Setting a media query of say 800px for tablet works for say desktop and some tablets but doesn't seem to be working for something like a surface. So is there a different way to set up width? I have code of the site but I don't think any of it would be helpful. If needed let me know.
Try using vh(viewport height) for height and vw(viewport width) for width, it uses percentage of the window. 100vh would use 100% of the window height and 100vw would use 100% of the window width. It's better than using pixels and requires less work to make the page responsive, pixels are inconsistent and break easily.
I hope the title makes sense. Making an element with a set width and height, I found out that it's much smaller than I expected on mobile and also on Chrome's responsive view on the dev tools.
The reason seems to be that apparently even though a screen is supposed to be, let's say, 320px wide, the body of the webpage is over 900px wide and the width of my element gets reduced accordingly. On desktop devices that doesn't happen and it works alright.
This only happens in some webpages and I don't know the difference. What I'm making is an element that is supposed to be embedded by copy/pasting the code so I can't fix the code of the webpages, just the element itself.
What can I do and why could this be? Thanks a lot.
While searching for an easy way to make my menu (http://www.ck-game.com/newIndex.html) fit screen size I stumbled over the possibility of using the browser's zoom functionalities (zoom, moz-zoom, etc.). I could imagine that it's much easier than using "em", "%" and media queries to make an elastic layout, more so because I have background-images which need to keep aspect ratio. Is there anything that speaks against using it besides someone wanting to actually zoom in/out and then the menu would adjust to it?
EDIT:
Proof of concept: http://www.ck-game.com/newIndex.html
Please try with different viewports and see how well it adapts :) Tested in IE9, latest FF and latest Chrome. Works on Android devices, breaks on most iOS devices.
I'm working on putting together a liquid style-sheet and it works wonderful. One thing that I've noticed is that my browser window in Chrome won't resize below 400px it just gets stuck there and in FF as I scale down it it just stops at around 400px and then pops a horizontal scroll bar.
When I open the site on my phone it looks perfect at around 320px, so I know it does scale lower than 400px.
I was curious if anyone knew if this was a browser/desktop thing or if I should be looking at something other than my CSS. I don't have any min-width declarations so i'm not sure what could be causing this.
Again on desktop it scales down to a min-width of about 400px and stops, but when I open it up on my phone it scales to the size of the phone screen which is roughly 320px... curious why at the very least it won't scale down to the 320px on desktop.
-edit-
Also I'm not sure if this matters but Opera allows it to scale down to pretty much nothing... So it works with Opera and not in Chrome or FF... any ideas?
Chrome cannot resize horizontally below 400px (OS X) or 218px (Windows) but I have a really simple solution to the problem:
Dock the web inspector to the right instead of to the bottom
Resize the inspector panel - you can now make the browser area really small (down to 0px)
Update: Chrome now allows you to arrange the inspector windows vertically when docked to the right! This really improves the layout.
The HTML and CSS panels fit really well and you even open a small console panel too.
This has allowed me to completely move from Firefox/Firebug to Chrome.
If you want to go a step further look at the web inspector settings (cog icon, bottom-right), and goto the user agent tab. You can set the screen resolution to whatever you like here and even quickly toggle between portrait and landscape.
UPDATE: Here is another really cool tool I've come across. http://lab.maltewassermann.com/viewport-resizer/
this may be because of the addons you installed on your browser. remove or hide all addon icons from the tool bar and try re size. when there are addons browser only resize the address bar and keeps the addons visible.
Update: 7/14/2013
With the latest chrome version, now you can re-size the address bar and it will hide the addons automatically.
I was stumped as well but ended up with a simple solution. I just created a HTML file with a link to open a new window:
Open!
This new window has nothing but the address bar and Chrome lets me freely resize this down to 111x80.
nayan9's solution works great, and can be put into a bookmark without having to create a html file. In Chrome, create a new bookmark with URL:
javascript:(function(){window.open('ANY_URL', '','width=320,height=480');})();
And give it a name of "Open Small Window" or something similar. This will allow you to easily open windows without size restrictions within chrome. Note that just copying this into your address bar won't work - chrome strips the "javascript:" out.
In case you want to reduce your screen width to emulate different devices (and why else would you want to do this?):
Chrome now has an Emulation section in its inspector, activated by clicking the little phone icon in the top menubar (between the magnifying glass and Elements):
Emulation mode allows you to set the viewport size to all common mobile screen sizes, among other nice features, like emulating touch, geolocation and even accelerometer input:
Adding to what nayan9 and drinkdecaf said, you can just throw document.URL into the call to window.open to see the page you're currently viewing in the 320 window. You might want to add some more to the width if you're expecting a scrollbar.
javascript:(function(){window.open(document.URL, '','width=320,height=480');})();
I am lazy, to make it even easier, let the bookmarklet ask the user for sizes :-D
javascript: (function() {var width = prompt('Enter window width:', '320');var height = prompt('Enter window height:','480');var url = prompt('Enter window URL');if (url.indexOf(':') < 0) {url = 'http://'+url;} window.open(url, '','width='+width+',height='+height);})()
in chrome the icons of your addons in the top right corner cause the problem
-> resize the adress-bar (where you type the urls) to maximum width (drag the bar at the right edge to the right)
or disable the icons
The DevTools in Chrome have moved on substantially from when most of these answers were posted. The best way to address this issue now is to use the emulators that are built into Chrome.
To use the emulators open DevTools (press F12) and then click on the following icon to toggle the Device Toolbar:
This will then allow you to emulate whichever mobile device or viewport size you want to.
I found a quick workaround for this.
Just install the Responsive Web Design Add-on to Chrome, and it will open a separate window without the address bar and tabs, which can be scaled down to 10 px or less.
Link here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/responsive-web-design-tes/bdpelkpfhjfiacjeobkhlkkgaphbobea/related
I've been experiencing similar issues and just found a good work around. Open up your chrome devtools and in the top left, there's a little screen and ipad icon. Click that and it opens a mobile view of your page. You can set it to predefined devices or a custom resolution. Pretty nifty actually.
Another easy solution is to click Strg+Shift+N to enter Incognito Mode. There you can resize your Browser window as you like.
I like this tool because it lets you switch quickly and also switches between portrait/horizontal easily for mobile sizes. It also allows you to make a personalized bookmark let, so if you design for obscure resolutions frequently, you can save them and use them.
I had to use one of these tools because even with the above answer I couldn't get my window to scale to 320 properly, this tool seems to be a faster solution overall.
http://lab.maltewassermann.com/viewport-resizer/
I'm always running into this issue with pinned tabs. Chrome will not resize below a horizontal width of eight visible pinned tabs if there are any! Just detach the tab that you want to resize to solve this ...
For a web developer, in order to test the responsiveness of their website in mobile or tablet whose size is less than 500px or minimum width then use developer tools to test in small screens.
For testing, go to developer tools and press ctrl+shift+M or click the device icon at the top left of the developer tools screen to toggle device mode. If the device icon is in blue colour, then you can test your website responsiveness by changing the browser window.
This is my first contribution to the Stack Overflow community, and it is my effort to give back to all you wonderful people who have made internet such a powerful tool.
Now to answer:
Safari, has this cool feature.
You need to activate safari developer option in preferences.
Screenshot of setting up preferences in Safari to activate developer menu
Once activated you can access bunch of very powerful developer tools.
One of this tool is Viewport adjustment which can used to test your website responsive layout.
To activate responsive lay out testing, one can use the shortcut Command+Ctrl+R
to activate safari view port adjustment option.
This will give you enough control to test your website on various view port sizes.
Screen shot of how your browser window will look once responsive layout test option is activated.
Link to how to activate developer menu in safari:
https://coolestguidesontheplanet.com/safari-web-developer-tools-show-dock-browser-window/
A lot of smart phones scale the page to fit into their screen size using zooming. Your minimum page width is probably 400px. Without any example code, I think that's all that can be said.
I recently put together a website exclusively using a computer with a wide screen monitor. Later, When opening the same pages online using a computer with a smaller sized monitor, I suddenly noticed that all the div positions are completely out of place. My question is how to use the widescreen monitor to continue to develop my webpages without messing up div positions for views on regular sized monitors?
Re replies:
Thanks for the advice guys. I agree that the design of the page should be flexible enough to accommodate most browser window sizes. However, when u are working with a widescreen monitor and not paying attention it is easy to overcompensate div placements and element sizes. My next question is on how to be sure of regular browser window dimensions and how to force my browser window into that size?
Thanks Cyrena for giving me directions with the development tools. I do use them and check across browsers. But My problem here was working exclusively on a widescreen monitor with the browser maximized. I don't want to make the same mistake, so I need to figure out how to resize my browser window with the right dimensions.
Two basic approaches off the top of my head:
Resize your browser to be the width of your minumum supported desktop/browser size.
Set desktop preferences to be different sizes (like profiles) and switch between them during testing phase.
The truth is that a really good looking site will never work on all browser configurations. Choose a bar and work against that.
Don't maximize your browser window? Just shrink it horizontally a bit?
But any website that has such a high dependence on the shape of your display is poorly designed. It should fit to any size display that's bigger than some minimum (no use spending extra effort to make it fit on a 100x100 pixel screen)
If you use IE's Developer Tools, you can resize the window to see what it would look like at different resolutions.
Check it out in:
Tools > Developer Tools > Tools menu > Resize.
You will also want to make sure you are testing your website on other browser / OS combinations at the very least.