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Comment by smackfu | Hacker News Reader

Surprised that escape doesn't work to exit fullscreen.

I meant to mention that -- Firefox uses ESC to exit fullscreen but Chrome uses Cmd+Shift+F. They need to standardize that.

esc works for me on 17.0.942.0 dev on OS X

Crap, I want to use this in my web game, but my users are already used to using esc for other stuff.

Firefox should be coming out with another API call that lets you have full access to keys in fullscreen mode (http://jlongster.com/2011/11/21/canvas.html#keys).

Although you would be breaking the standard convention.

And for me on 16.0.912.41 beta, also on OS X.

Ah yes, I'm on Chrome, and I figured that would be a pretty good way to get someone trapped in full screen.

Outside the mac world, "F11" is a pretty much universal "toggle full screen" binding. Chrome at least supports with on-screen help when you enter full screen mode.

As you said, F11 is universal for toggling on off, but it's not a good solution when there may be multiple elements on a page which might fight for fullscreen requests. For instance, if I have 4 videos on a page, and F11 is pressed, which video goes full screen? In the context of web browsing, where the user is choosing which elements to launch full screen, the ESC button really should be standardized.

I don't follow. Obviously you can only toggle to full screen for something unambiguous (i.e. the whole browser page). I don't see how pressing ESC helps the user decide which of the videos to launch.

But once you're full screen, F11 does indeed get you back to the original state. So I still don't see why ESC is needed.

>So I still don't see why ESC is needed.

The main reason is that you probably got into full-screen by pressing a button, not the F11 key, and now you just want a "get me out of this" key which escape is better for.

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