Is it possible make a browser window go full screen?

May 30, 2006 4:31 PM

Is it possible make a browser window go full screen? Not "fake full screen," but full-on, PowerPoint style full screen mode?

I'm trying to make a web-based presentation tool a la PowerPoint (except it won't encourage boring presentations), but I want to be able to have a full screen mode when the slide show is viewed.

I'd like to be able to do it in all the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, etc.), and be enabled at the click of a link or submit button.

Is it possible? If so, how?

posted by josh.ev9 to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

You will probably want to look into kiosk web browsers built atop WebKit.

One example that takes over the entire screen with a keypress is NCSU webXkiosk.

The source code is available so that you could write into the browser a custom Javascript action response. If a form button is pressed the code triggers full-screen mode.
posted by Mr. Six at 4:37 PM on May 30, 2006

Opera has a presentation mode that you can use. It has some markup that you can use specifically for that kind of stuff.

More info here.
posted by bigmusic at 4:48 PM on May 30, 2006

Are you talking about users going to a site and clicking a button and having the browser go full screen? If so, then the answer is no. This would be a security headache, to say the least (with that said, I believe this was possible with an older version of IE). If you're talking about running a powerpoint-like presentation from a browser on your machine then there are many 3rd party soluions (see above).
posted by gwint at 4:57 PM on May 30, 2006

MSIE (mine is 6.0, win2k) has an F11 "fullscreen" if that's what you mean.. (makes the start bar at the bottom disappear, and the extreme top blue bar disappear with only mini icons and an address bar and micro-sized _ [] x in the corner.
posted by vanoakenfold at 5:07 PM on May 30, 2006

Just tried it in Firefox (1.0) and F11 does the same there also.
posted by vanoakenfold at 5:10 PM on May 30, 2006

Internet Explorer: Press F11, right click on the toolbar and check the AutoHide option.
FireFox: Install the AutoHide extension and press F11.
posted by Sharcho at 5:22 PM on May 30, 2006

In Safari you can do it with Saft, but not natively.
posted by doctor_negative at 5:29 PM on May 30, 2006

Opera, just hit F11.
posted by evariste at 7:20 PM on May 30, 2006

Is there any way to invoke the F11 mode automatically? Or does a user have to press F11 to make that mode turn on?

Are there any work arounds with Flash, etc?
posted by josh.ev9 at 7:40 PM on May 30, 2006

For IE:

iexplore -k "c:\YourStartPage.htm"

Will start IE in kiosk mode with YourStarPage as the displayed page.
posted by Mitheral at 8:05 PM on May 30, 2006

At one point there was a way to launch a window in full screen mode. (led to a hack where you could have windows without the chrome).

It got annoying so most browsers took the ability out.
posted by bitdamaged at 10:05 PM on May 30, 2006

Not only it's annoying, it's a security issue, because you can spoof sites that way, e.g. create a picture of the location bar that displays https://www.paypal.com/
posted by Sharcho at 11:52 PM on May 30, 2006

Opera also Kiosk mode (-k command line argument)

More info here.
posted by nielm at 3:23 AM on May 31, 2006

I think that josh wants Javascript or HTML that will do it. You can't set the current window to fullscreen, but you can open a new window in that mode, by adding fullscreen=yes to the options.

window.open(url, name, 'fullscreen=yes');

If the URL isn't filtered out by MeFi, this link should open fullscreen.
posted by Plutor at 7:18 AM on May 31, 2006

Nope, filtered. Copy and paste "javascript:window.open('http://metafilter.com/', 'foo', 'fullscreen=yes')" into your location bar.
posted by Plutor at 7:19 AM on May 31, 2006

Aha! Thanks Plutor...that's pretty much it. I wish I could make it do "real" full screen, but from the comments of others, it looks like that's not gonna be possible.

Thanks MeFi!
posted by josh.ev9 at 10:00 AM on June 1, 2006