IPhone Safari Bookmark Creates New Session

Question

I have a strange problem with a site that I developed for one of our customers. I will bookmark the home page using the Safari menu item "Add to desktop". Then I will look for a while, and then return to the main screen of the phone, for example. if someone calls me or I check mail or something that iPhone users do. When I click a bookmark on the main screen, I will go to the login page. When I log in, they take me to the home page as usual, but if I try to move elsewhere, the link opens in a new browser instance. I know this because my bookmark link opens a Safari session in full-screen mode, but the new browsing link opens a Safari session with the address bar and other goodies. Then I need to log in again, but this time everything works fine.

It is only when I use the bookmarked link that it does this strange thing to login. The site works great on desktop computers (Mac and PC), as well as on Android and Windows Phone 7.x and 8.x devices.

Answer 1

Correctly, one way or another, the problem was that another developer added the meta tag <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> . What this means is to tell iOS that the webpage supports offline mode. Unfortunately, we do not. I changed the tag to <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="no"> and everything was fine.

This is not a problem in our case, because the meta tag was placed there by mistake. We just need a meta tag for the bright desktop icon, and the above tag was also in the code snippet.