orientation

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The orientation CSS media feature can be used to test the orientation of the viewport (or the page box, for paged media).

Note: This feature does not correspond to device orientation. Opening the soft keyboard on many devices in portrait orientation will cause the viewport to become wider than it is tall, thereby causing the browser to use landscape styles instead of portrait.

Syntax

The orientation feature is specified as a keyword value chosen from the list below.

Keyword values

portrait: The viewport is in a portrait orientation, i.e., the height is greater than or equal to the width.
landscape: The viewport is in a landscape orientation, i.e., the width is greater than the height.

Examples

Portrait orientation

In this example we have three boxes in the HTML, and use the orientation media feature to switch between a row layout (in landscape) and a column layout (in portrait).

The example output is embedded in an <iframe> whose height is greater than its width, so the boxes get a column layout.

HTML

html

<div>Box 1</div>
<div>Box 2</div>
<div>Box 3</div>

CSS

css

body {
  display: flex;
}

div {
  background: yellow;
  width: 200px;
  height: 200px;
  margin: 0.5rem;
  padding: 0.5rem;
}

@media (orientation: landscape) {
  body {
    flex-direction: row;
  }
}

@media (orientation: portrait) {
  body {
    flex-direction: column;
  }
}

Result

Landscape orientation

This example has exactly the same code as the previous example: it has three boxes in the HTML, and uses the orientation media feature to switch between a row layout (in landscape) and a column layout (in portrait).

However, in this example, the example output is embedded in an <iframe> whose height is less than its width, so the boxes get a row layout.

HTML

html

<div>Box 1</div>
<div>Box 2</div>
<div>Box 3</div>

CSS

css

body {
  display: flex;
}

div {
  background: yellow;
  width: 200px;
  height: 200px;
  margin: 0.5rem;
  padding: 0.5rem;
}

@media (orientation: landscape) {
  body {
    flex-direction: row;
  }
}

@media (orientation: portrait) {
  body {
    flex-direction: column;
  }
}

Specifications

Specification
Media Queries Level 4 # orientation

Browser compatibility

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