A common browser keyboard shortcut that I’ve never used – nor properly cared about until recently – is F11. With most browsers, tapping F11 puts you into some variation of full screen mode. When using a tiny display or low resolution you might find this very helpful to maximize what you’re seeing.
To be clear, this full screen mode is not the same as clicking the “maximize” button in the title bar. When maximized you still see all of the browser elements. When in full screen mode you (typically) just see the current page’s content. Toolbars, addresses, statuses, tabs all are hidden away.
I’m learning, however, that there are some interesting wrinkles to how this is implemented across various browsers. What follows are some of my observations.
My current choice on my 7” Eee, K-Meleon is very light and fast — and has a low-frills full screen mode. Ctrl-Tab works to flip between full screened tabs and… that’s about it.
Want to update a tab’s URL? You’ll have to pop out of full screen mode. Hit ctrl-T for a new tab? You’ll have to exit full screen to give it an address.
Is this how Firefox 2 worked? I don’t have one installed to check.
Firefox 3 has a nice wrinkle on running full screen: Bump your mouse to the top of the screen and the tab and address bar sections will slide down for easy access. Move the mouse back down and they accordion up. That nicely addresses my perceived shortcoming of K-Meleon.
Everything else works the same. Ctrl-T to add a tab and Ctrl-Tab to cycle through existing tabs.
As near as I can tell, IE 7 behaves exactly the same as FF 3 for this stuff. Handy.
Opera works a lot like K-Meleon. In other words, you must exit full screen mode to see or change the URL. However, it does add one nice feature that the other browsers could add. When using Ctrl-Tab to cycle through tabs, it pops a list of the titles of the current tabs and you chose from there. No need to flip entire pages, you can use the little list to jump to the one you want.
Um… no full screen mode available? Really? That’s one reason its not on my Eee netbook. (the other reason is that I didn’t find an intuitive way to manage or move the cache files. I don’t want them on my SSD drive). I know this just officially came out of beta, but I’m not sure that it is really done baking yet.
I failed to find a full screen option for this one either. I tend not to use it unless testing new layouts due to the fact that the font rendering makes me cry (on Windows. Of course it is lovely on a Mac).
Conclusions
Well, I don’t really have any conclusions, just more questions. For instance, surely there are ways to see/change the address bar when in K-Meleon or Opera full screen mode? What’s the “standard” keyboard shortcut to select the address bar? And what the heck is the deal with Chrome? This is a fast and light browser that is almost perfect for netbooks. Why the omission of a proper full screen mode? Pixels are precious!
Anything I missed? Please drop comments for corrections or additions!
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December 21st, 2008 
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I’ve wished for the CTRL-TAB thing for ages without ever checking to see if it was there. Thank you.
FWIW: F11 on the Mac hides all the windows so you can see your desktop.
Speaking of Macs and Safari. Safari has something called “zoom” on the menu, but it didn’t seem to do anything for me. Would that be what I’m looking for by chance?