Many Windows applications (games, web browsers, some editors, etc.) support fullscreen mode, in which the application’s client area covers the entire screen.
As a Win32 developer, I have always implemented full-screen by
- removing the window’s frames and title bar, and
- setting the window’s position to (top, left, width, height) = (0, 0, screen width, screen height).
Another possibility is to keep the title bar, and set the position to (-some offset, -some offset, screen width + some offset, screen height + some offset).
I think that my solution sounds safer, in the sense that it does not depend as much on system metrics and behaviour, but I think I have seen the latter one a few times. In addtion, in many full-screen programs (such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc.), you can still use Alt+Space (or F10) to access the system menu, which indicates that the second method has been used.
But surely one major drawback of the second approach is that, on a multi-monitor system, the borders of the fullscreen window are visible on the other screens?
So my question is: which method is most appropriate and which is being used the most?
Grab a copy of WinSpy++, set it to always on top and inspect some browser windows in fullscreen mode (Both IE6 and Firefox 3.6 remove the titlebar)
And since both Firefox and Chrome are open source, you can just go and check the source 🙂