When OSX Lion came out, most apps had the ability to fullscreen by clicking on the fullscreen icon on the top right of the window titlebar. Chrome had this, and then a day later it was updated to remove it. There was speculation that it did not “work right” even though when I used it, it worked just fine.

I then engaged in some IRC flame wars about what “full screen” really means. Most people seem to think Fullscreen means while the entire screen is used by the application, they should still see the address and tab bar of the browser. To me this is NOT fullscreen, this is just really big. Full screen to me means that all UI is hidden except for the main work area. In this case, the work area is the HTML viewport, so I believe the tabs and address bar should be hidden while in fullscreen, yet easily accessible somehow like touching the top of the screen with the mouse cursor.

Google Chrome 14 has finally updated with full support for OSX Lion, and I am quite impressed with their solution. Considering how bad things like the bookmark manager is in Chrome I assumed they would pick one method of fullscreen and that would be it.

In this case I am so glad I was wrong. Now we can fullscreen with the normal fullscreen button again.

This fullscreen is not real fullscreen, as the tabs and address bar are still visible like the paranoid people want. However, when fullscreened, the fullscreen button turns into a Full Fullscreen button.

Clicking this draws the address bar and tab bar up into the top of the screen, leaving you with a perfectly clean full fullscreen workspace.

And to come out of fullscreen, you can use the icon that shows on the menu bar, no need to remember an arcane keyboard combo. The menubar and browser chrome become visible when you touch the top edge of your screen with the cursor.

Well played Google Chrome. Well played indeed.