Comments on: Why Aren’t Browsers Automatically Optimized for Smaller Screens?

By: James Kendrick

James Kendrick — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:22:03 +0000

OS X has the little blue button in the upper right corner that works very well with Firefox.

By: DaveZatz

DaveZatz — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:14:48 +0000

I agree with the premise, but wonder if there are really tens of millions of netbooks out there. I’m a big fan of F11 (Firefox, IE) on Windows. Sadly, no such luck on OS X. (Opera has a kiosk mode, but tabs are not readily visible.)

By: st1v

st1v — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:24:46 +0000

Also, try Tiny Menu, it collapses Menu items in a cascade button.

By: Richard Chacon

Richard Chacon — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:24:56 +0000

just use the F11 key in firefox, turns the resolution to 1024 x 768, then hit F11 again to toggle out.

By: Sean Brady

Sean Brady — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:30:36 +0000

JKK did a great job of working with FF out of the box. I setup my FF (even on my big screens) to just use a single bar at the top. I like the screen space. I will note that the Personal Menu extension for FF offers the ability to quickly hide the Menu bar. It is the one UI altering extension I use.

By: Justin Case

Justin Case — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:02:38 +0000

Try using Opera:
- it’s available for every current OS under the sun,
- has a lot of minimal skins available couple of right clicks away,
- can reflow pages,
- and does zooming properly.
- no add-ons necessary.
- in case you want to fiddle with it, very customizable.

I installed it on my Aspire One, never looked at pre-installed old version Firefox again.
I must admit I am used to Opera on my regular 2×24″ desktop too, so you can consider me biased. But do give it a spin for a couple of days.

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 02:13:10 +0000

I did something similar with Firefox on my Aspire One. However instead of turning the features off completely, I use the autoHideStatusbar and Hide Menubar plugins. That way I can easily and quickly bring the features back temporarily if I need them.

By: Mickey Segal

Mickey Segal — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:40:56 +0000

The problem is far worse with other programs such as Windows Live Mail, as I outlined at http://www.segal.org/tablet/live/.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:34:23 +0000

it might be useful, but it might be better to base the decision on something more than just screen resolution… like physical screen size and PPI(DPI). then, if we ever see them, small sized high-PPI screens would get the optimizations too.

anyway, the average user would also have a lot of room if they didn’t install every stupid google toolbar, yahoo toolbar, and windows live toolbar that comes their way. =P

By: jkkmobile

jkkmobile — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:36:26 +0000

Yep, it would be super if browser would notice low resolution and ask if user wants to choose optimized setting.

.. same goes with other apps too.