Does the F11 for full screen mode convention used by many programs come about because F11 looks like “Full” sans vowel? I could not find a web resource discussing this — most results seem to point at incorrectly OCR’d PDFs containing the phrase “full screen”.

In any case, for the last few months I’ve usually run my web browser (Firefox) in full screen mode, saving precious vertical real estate, and removing one source of distraction (seeing other tabs). In its default setting, move the pointer to the top of the screen to see tabs and URL bar. You have to switch out of full screen mode (merely press F11) to access the menubar. If you hate needless animation like I do, go to about:config and set browser.fullscreen.animateUp to 0.

F11 also works in Chromium (one has to toggle out of full screen to see other tabs, which makes sense, as tabs occupy the title bar), Konqueror (but the URL bar won’t go away unless you turn it off separately; very old feature request), and Ephipany (but again the URL bar won’t go away, there’s a very old feature request for that, and turning it off first causes a crash).

Although I used to swear by vertical tabs (most recently with an extension called Vertical Tabs), I’ve stopped using them. They remain visible in fullscreen mode, make it too easy to pile up hundreds of open tabs, and bizarrely my laptop screens have fewer pixels than they did in 2005, so I don’t have an urge to use up horizontal space).