This has been something of a personal quest for the Holy Grail. I’ve wanted to have a full screen browser on my Mac for a very long time. I’ve searched for plugins, I’ve searched for special browsers, but no luck. Until today! And it has been hiding under my nose the whole time: Opera 9.6!
I’ve had Opera on my machine for a long time, pretty much only for testing purposes, but today, I upgraded it and decided to take it for a little spin, only to have the Holy Grail dropped in my lap!
Why would I want full screen web browsing on the Mac? For presentations, for kiosk displays (I’m going to be using this next week at a teacher recruitment gig), for distraction free google doc work, and just for the heck of it!
If you’ve been looking for a full screen web browser on the Mac, check out Opera, and comment on this post. I’d love to know I’m wasn’t alone in this search!
yeah, i was talking to salesman at our local mac shop today and he claimed (hand on his heart) that browser in fullscreen mode is unpossible. and then (of course) he tried to convince me that fullscreen feature of a browser is completely useless. i’d almost offered him some warm water with sugar in it.
The good part about mac: they are pretty, and work well. The bad part: Nobody at apple can figure out why you would ever want a feature that they themselves don’t use. Oh well, go back and show him the web in its full screen glory!
Mozilla firefox 3.5.6 also allows for full screen browsing. After installation and startup of the application, just click “windows” on the menu bar and then click the “Zoom” option.
Phill, I just tried this out and, I think you might be misunderstanding what I mean by “fullscreen”. Firefox’s “window > zoom” function is basically the same as clicking the green circle at the top left of any window — it maximizes that window to take up as much of the screen as possible, but you can still see the OS menu bar and the browser toolbars. What I was really looking for (and what Opera provides) is sometimes referred to as “Kiosk mode”. it’s like Dvd Player’s fullscreen mode: the webpage takes up all of the screen and all of the toolbars disappear.
Also, check out Plainview. It’s not as fully featured as Opera, but it’s a wonderful program, written specifically for full-screen presentations and kiosk mode. Small, free download.
http://www.barbariangroup.com/software/plainview
Firefox 3.6 for mac just added full screen view. The simplicity of Plainview is nice but I worried about security issues.
Thanks! Firefox just keeps getting better. Now if I could only get it to magically run twice as fast as Chrome, even with my zillions of extensions all operating at once. What security issues are you referring to in Plainview? I haven’t spent much of any time with Plainview, but I really liked it’s kiosk mode and ability to do presentations of sorts.