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Make Firefox full screen even better with Fullerscreen
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CommentsFirefox already has a Full Screen feature, which you can access by going to View -> Full Screen, or by pressing F11. However, the standard Firefox full screen view still includes a location/toolbar and a tab bar, if you have any tabs open.
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| Figure 1: Firefox's native full screen - click to view |
The Fullerscreen extension extends the Web page from top to bottom and to both sides of the screen. The only intrusion by browser chrome is the scrollbar, if the page requires scrolling.
Daniel Glazman, lead engineer on the Nvu project, has been putting up builds of the Fullerscreen extension under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) on his blog and on Firefox's Add-ons site. The most recent version, as of this writing, is 0.98.
To get the extension, go to Firefox's Add-ons site, or visit Glazman's blog for the most recent builds. On the Add-ons site, you can just click the Install button and Firefox will walk you through the installation process. If you grab the extension from Glazman's site, it will be saved to Firefox's default download directory. Go to File -> Open File and navigate to the default download directory. Select the file named fullerscreen-x.xx.xpi, where x.xx is the version number, click Open, and Firefox will walk you through the installation.
Once Fullerscreen is installed, you'll need to restart Firefox. Then, open the Add-ons manager by going to Tools -> Add-ons and select Fullerscreen. Click Preferences to modify Fullerscreen's behavior.
In the preference dialog, you can tweak Fullerscreen's behavior -- how close the mouse gets to the edge of the screen before Fullerscreen displays the toolbar, whether you'll see updates to the status bar, and how long the toolbar should be displayed. I turn off the status bar updates because I rarely care about the messages displayed there, and if it's left on, the status bar will be displayed almost constantly when viewing some sites, such as Gmail.
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| Figure 2: Firefox with Fullerscreen - click to view |
You can also get to the preferences dialog by going to the status bar and right-clicking on the Fullerscreen icon, which is a square with four arrows pointing at the corners of the square.
After you've set the preferences, close the Add-ons manager, go to a Web page you want to see full screen, and press F11 or click the Fullerscreen icon on the status bar. At this point, you should have nothing but Web page staring you in the face. Take a few seconds to bask in the glory of having no distractions -- no location bar, no tab bar, no status bar. Nada -- just Web page.
If you want to enter a URL, type Ctrl-l. Instead of bringing the cursor to the location bar, Fullerscreen will open the Open Web Location dialog. If you want to search, type Ctrl-k, which will take you to Firefox's default search engine.
Fullerscreen may seem like a small addition to Firefox, but makes using Web-based applications far more pleasant and productive. It's also a big boon when using a laptop or monitor that doesn't have a high resolution. My desktop machine sports a 1680x1050 resolution, so Firefox has oodles of room to spread out without needing the full screen feature, but when working off of my ThinkPad, with its dinky 1024x768 resolution, I want all the screen space I can get for the actual Web page. That makes Fullerscreen an invaluable tool.
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on Make Firefox full screen even better with FullerscreenNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
The network is not the operating system, nor should it be.
My files, no latency, no prying eyes.
HOWEVER, Fullerscreen presented some erratic behaviour after some time: it kept returning to fullscreen mode even when not told to do it (don't know if this is related to the extra Ctrl-F bar in Firefox). So I deactivated it... but it's so good that FF should have it by default.
<a href="http://www.doilikeu.com/" title="doilikeu.com">http://www.doilikeu.com/</a doilikeu.com>
- KDE (3.2.3 on old Mandrake 10.1) with a panel and a right-side hiding button;
- FF 2.0.0.3, maximized most of the time and
- focus-follow-mouse, no autoraise, no click to raise -- maybe this is important.
I seem to have figured how to reproduce it:
1) Hide panel. FF window automatically expands to lower screen border;
2) Move pointer to lower screen border. Nothing happens.
3) Move mouse pointer up, leaving lower border vicinity. Since full screen was not selected, nothing should happen. But Fullerscreen kicks in and removes the status bar (below), the tab bar (above) and the address bar (above). Window title bar and FF menu both remain visible.
4) Moving the pointer to and from the lower border make the disappearing bars come back for an instant.
5) Sometimes steps 2 and 3 must be repeated 2-3 times to trigger this behaviour. Or, more probably, maybe in step 2 one must hold the pointer at the lower border for a minimum amount of time.
6) Pressing F11 two times makes things go normal again.
Also, I understand this could somehow be a misunderstanding on my part, it could be normal behaviour as intended by the developer (Daniel Glazman).
As for filing a bug, I didn't find how to do it. There are reviews and discussions, both requiring login, which I don't intend to do. I hope Daniel comes by here...
Fullerscreen is now reactivated and working wonderfully... Whew, that was fast...
PS: The lowercase x in the subject is to avoid the lameness filter. Apparently, lameness is subjective...
I've mailed using the contact at site asking to clear up on this, having read info, faq, and grepped through unpacked xpi.
--
Michael Shigorin
Ofcourse, it could be that the author is unaware of this and that he could be motivated to open the source with little effort.
All three are fixed in the forthcoming version, so please stay tuned.
Daniel Glazman
That makes all the difference. No AutoHide for me.
<a href="http://www.krickelkrackel.de/autohide/" title="krickelkrackel.de">http://www.krickelkrackel.de/autohide/</a krickelkrackel.de>
It does the same, but has additional features like allowing you to put a "fullscreen" button on the menu.
More importantly, it behaves in a more natural way, doesn't require a lot of configuration and plays nice with other addons. Fullerscreen gets quirky if you have other addons running that modify the screen layout.
And last but not least, AutoHide isn't a plug for the website of a bunch of other products. Granted, FullerScreen -is- under an open license, whereas AutoHide is not. If you prefer that over ease of use, features and robustness, by all means use FullerScreen. Otherwise, AutoHide is the way to go.
At the very least, try both and make up your own mind.
Hmm
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 06, 2007 08:56 AMMaybe good in a store where customer should only be able to check out the pages on the store or something...
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