The Full-Screen Website Experience

Full Screen Website Button on Dianetics Website

One feature that escaped me on first inspection of the new Dianetics Video Channel Website is the little “fullscreen” button on the top banner of the site.

I’ll have to be dead-honest, I’ve been on the web since 1994, with my first browser as Netscape 0.9 on Windows 3.1.  While I have seen full screen videos on YouTube for some time, this is the first time I’ve seen an attempt at a full-screen website.

Now, for a media-centric website like this one, where you have something like 60 different videos on Dianetics, all done in 16 languages, and so much other assorted Flash content, I can definitely see the use case for wanting to do the thing full screen.  Try it — as long as you’ve got a decently fast computer with a decent video card, it’ll roll just fine.  My box that I’m writing on right now is an AMD Phenom quad-core box, so it does have enough grunt to move all of the media around the screen.  It chugs a bit on my Apple PowerBook G4, but fine.

My question is as to how many other people prefer such a thing.

I’ve had countless discussions with designers and programmers who get into the whole “rez” argument with me.  I.e., I show them the Google Analytics that shows that x percentage of people are running with a 1280px wide screen, therefore we should be able to design for screens that are that wide.  Then, I get the argument that nobody in their right mind runs with their browser at full-screen, and most people then still only see 800px in their actual browser window.  Then there are some people that do the good old “F11″ trick and run full screen.

On the most up-beat site I run with the most media, the stats I show are:

current statistics on screen resolutions

The above stats would clearly make you say “we can TOTALLY dump the idea of designing for 800×600!”  – but my question is how many of those 1024×768 people or 1680×1050 people are looking at a maximized browser?

Not I, as I have dual 1280×1024 flatscreens, so a maximized browser for me would be a bit unusable:

dual-screen screenshot -- why I can't run my browser maximized

I’ve not seen any conclusive evidence either way, as to what people run, in the main.  I never run my browser maximized, so that’s my own polarized view of the universe.   Curious as to what others think, though!