Show 'Search' button in iPhone/iPad Safari keyboard

Solution 1:

having type="search" is usually all you need to make software Search keyboard appear however in iOS8 it is mandatory to have a wrapping form with action attribute.

So the following code would have a software keyboard with “Return” button

<form>
    <input type="search" />
</form>

But this code should have blue “Search” button instead

<form action=".">
    <input type="search" />
</form>

Solution 2:

You can influence this behaviour with:

<input type="search" />

JS Bin demo

Ignore the submit button's text being 'kettle,' I just wanted to be sure that it wasn't the submit button influencing the text of the iOS keyboard...

This is, of course, backwards compatible since a browser that doesn't understand type="search" will default to type="text", which is useful for creating forward-planning html5 forms.

Solution 3:

I was not able to get the search button with

<input type="search" />

However, I did get it to appear with

<form>
    <input name="search" />
</form>