Safari on Apple HomeView: will your website work on a square screen?

Apple HomeView now has Safari, so people can open websites on its 7-inch square screen, by touch or by voice from across the room. WebKit, the team behind Safari, says most websites need no change. Sites with tall pop-ups, big sticky headers, or code that guesses the device from its name can break. A quick test on a phone turned sideways shows most problems.

What is changing?

The WebKit team announced on 13 November 2026 that Safari now runs on Apple HomeView, next to Safari on Mac, iPhone, iPad and visionOS. HomeView is a home device with a square 7-inch display. People mostly talk to it, and can also tap the screen.

Because it is the same Safari engine, a website built to normal modern standards should work there without changes.

What can go wrong on a site?

WebKit lists a few habits that cause trouble on a new kind of screen:

• The screen is square and short. WebKit says the viewport is under 600 pixels tall, so a fixed header and footer can leave almost no room for the page itself.
• Pop-ups taller than the screen, such as newsletter sign-up boxes, may leave the visitor with no way to reach the close button.
• HomeView reports itself as iOS. Code that treats every iOS visitor as an iPhone, for example to push an app download banner, will guess wrong.
• Voice users call a button by its name. Buttons and links need clear text labels, and real HTML buttons instead of clickable pictures, so the device can tell what to press.

For recipe sites, Safari on HomeView can show a step by step cooking view, built from the recipe details in the page's structured data. Videos show captions when the site provides a caption file.

What to do

1. Open your website on a phone, turn it sideways, and scroll through the home page, a product or service page and your contact form.
2. Check that any pop-up can be closed without scrolling past the screen, and that the header does not cover most of the page.
3. Ask your web designer whether the site detects devices by name. If it does, ask them to test for features instead, as WebKit recommends.
4. Make sure every button and link has plain words on it, such as "Get a quote" or "WhatsApp us", next to any icon.
5. If you run a food or recipe website, ask your developer to add recipe structured data so the cooking view can pick it up.

These checks also help visitors on small laptops and phones held sideways, so they are worth doing even if few of your customers own a HomeView.

How SyncTech can help

If your site fails these checks, our web design team in Malaysia can fix layouts that break on short or unusual screens.

Source and credit

We are sharing this news from the WebKit blog. This summary is written by Synctech in our own words.

• Safari on Apple HomeView, WebKit blog (Jen Simmons), 13 November 2026: https://webkit.org/blog/18608/safari-on-apple-homeview/

Retrieved 15 November 2026. Apple, Safari, HomeView, iPhone, iPad and WebKit are trademarks of Apple Inc. Synctech is not connected with Apple. This is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. If anything here is wrong, email support@synctech.com.my and we will correct it.