keyboard does not show up on an iPad/iPhone in Mobile Safari

[shazron]

The keyboard does not show up on an iPad/iPhone when using Mobile Safari, preventing the user from entering search data in the search field, which is the point of the whole website.

Expected:
When touching the search field to bring it into focus, the keyboard should be visible so the user can enter search terms.

Actual:
When touching the search field to bring it into focus, the keyboard is not visible, and the user cannot enter search terms.

Environment:
iPad 3 with iOS 7.1
iPhone 5s with iOS 7.1.1

[shazron]

One clue, the input tag seems to be 4px in length:

[shazron]

Some more data:
On a desktop browser, it looks like the website is auto focusing to the search field on load. This will not work on Mobile Safari since the keyboard display requires user interaction, not programmatically (unless you are using your own UIWebView, where you can enable a property so you can do this). So there might be assumptions somewhere that did not take into account Mobile Safari's behaviour.

[3rd-Eden]

The main problem is that the library that we use for the autocompletion does not seems to function on mobile as intended. The field is only focused once the search-pagelet is rendered in the DOM.

There are different ways around this problem:

1. Disabling the autocomplete completely for mobile & show an input element instead.
2. Use a different library for the autocomplete that does work correctly with mobile. The only requirement it has is that we can implement a custom autocomplete/request function so all data will be send over RPC (WebSockets)