Firefox can go full screen by just pressing the «F11» key on your keyboard or choosing the Full Screen option from the “View” menu. It will also hide away the top bar, which in full screen mode is composed by the address bar and the tabs bar. The browser will also play a smooth animation when hiding away the unnecessary part of the GUI.
Unluckily my computer is not that fast and Firefox interface is much slower on Linux than on Windows1 . So I would like to change some behaviour of the full screen mode, but the standard Preferences window doesn’t include any option about that. The only way is to go through the about:config interface.
Just type “about:config” in your address bar and press Enter. Please remember that this interface allows you to modify every little behaviour of the browser: pay extremely attention! After promising you will not do anything wrong, look for the following keys (you don’t need to type the exact words, just type “full” and they will come out):
- browser.fullscreen.animateUp
- browser.fullscreen.autohide
The first one, browser.fullscreen.animateUp, is about the animation: to stop any animation set it to ‘0‘ (zero). Setting it to ‘1‘, which is the default value, will make Firefox play the standard sliding animation. Other values have same behaviour as ‘1‘, but in the future may be used to specify different kind of animations.
The second option, browser.fullscreen.autohide, says whether Firefox should keep some of the interface (address bar and tabs bar) in full screen mode or not. Of course, if you set this option to ‘false‘, the previous one has no more meaning. The default value is ‘true‘.
- believe me: it’s hard for me to admit [↩]
linux