¶“Full” screen within a window in Firefox

2025-01-10

These days I'm using Google Meet a lot for video calls, running it directly in my Firefox browser window. When you make the browser window full screen, it's nice that there are no UI distractions—no browser chrome, no window manager chrome, no extraneous UI in Meet itself. But it means that you have to use the actual full screen! I often want to have a document open to the side, e.g. for note-taking, or because it's a document we're collectively reading through.

TIL that there's a configuration knob that tells Firefox to skip the “expand the window to use the full screen part”, and instead just removes all of the browser chrome. (No tab bar, no menu bar, no URL bar.) As of right now, I still have the window manager title bar, but that's close enough to what I need that I've haven't gone further.

In about:config, set the full-screen-api.ignore-widgets setting to true. With that in place, F11 (a Firefox shortcut) will invoke “full screen within this window”, while Mod-F (an i3 shortcut I've configured) will invoke “actually full screen”.

Making Firefox fullscreen-like without actually maximizing the window [superuser]