Full-screen API available in Firefox nightly | Hacker News Reader

Full-screen API available in Firefox nightly

arstechnica.com

40 pointssunsu15 comments

Now all we need is a mouse capture API to make first person games.

It's coming. There's a spec here: http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webevents/raw-file/default/mouse-lock....

Implementations for Chrome and Firefox are bug 72754 and bug 633602, respectively.

There is a serious problem in this proposal: they want to disallow all keys not on a whitelist, and that whitelist does not include letters. Which would mean no WASD movement. While the intent is good (prevent phishing), I think a better solution is still needed.

Actually, scratch that - there's a way for apps to request letter keys in full-screen mode, which just imposes additional confirmation.

Chrome has this and I truly and completely hate the way Youtube uses it. The only reason I switched to HTML5 video on YT was the fact that it resized to the browser window, therefore not wasting massive amounts of screen estate on my 24" monitor. The way I'd use it was to have the video on 2/3 of the screen and Vim on the other 1/3.

Alas, those days are gone, unless I figure out a way to override requestFullscreen to always return false.

If you want to disable it in Firefox, you can go to about:config and set the pref for full-screen-api.enabled to false.

I'm not sure if Chrome has a similar way to disable the feature.

What's wrong with asking the user to press F11? After all, the browser should be under the control of the user, instead of the other way around.

> A Web application can’t arbitrarily make an element fullscreen without user intervention—the operation has to be initiated by a user action.

As the article says, the intent is mostly to offer similar functionality as e.g. Youtube's fullscreen mode. It's much simpler/cleaner to ask ordinary users to click a button on the screen (that is a part of your own interface) than to ask them to press F11. Also, F11-fullscreen doesn't stretch elements as this does:

> It allows Web applications to toggle the browser into full-screen mode and stretch a single page element so that it fills the user’s display.

Another reason might be that some browsers, for example the Firefox I'm running right now on linux, don't go into 100% fullscreen like chrome does. In my browser, it just removes all of the browser's interface except the URL bar and tabs.

> Also, F11-fullscreen doesn't stretch elements as this does

Which begs the question, why not?

F11-fullscreen stretches the browser window.

Using the fullscreen API, you can put in fullscreen some specific parts of your website (a specific div, a specific menu, etc.).

I've been working on a digital signage project and I'm using Chrome's fullscreen kiosk mode for the actual presentation.

When will Mobile Safari support it?

I hate that Chrome has modified the fullscreen support so that it is no longer possible to have "fullscreen", mean "fullwindow" mode. It was my absolute favorite. Tiling WM or even manual, along with "fullwindow" mode was the best of all worlds. You were an F11 away from fullscreen, but had the flexibility of having just the video in a window to do with what you pleased.

Opera still has this feature. I use it all the time with wmii.

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