It's funny that they are talking about maximizing the vertical pixels while letting title bar, menu bar, url bar, bookmark bar, tab bar, horizontal scroll bar, and status bar eating up 1/3 of vertical pixels of the primary web browser window on the home page photo at <http://www.canonical.com/products/unity>.
Seriously, Open Source marketing should be improved in this level of detail. Yes netbooks have shallow screens, then why wasting 145 precious vertical pixels to show non-content controls on a web browser window only 428 pixels high?
Some naive ways to improve the impression:
* Make the browser window taller, preferably taking all available vertical space. Present more web content when you really want to improve the web experience. (Right now I can only see the big heading of NYT, not really interesting.)
* Bundle one of those Hide Menu plugin to kill menu bar. How often do you really need it? And when you do need it, just click one button on the url bar to summon it.
* Choose a page that is slightly narrower or widen the window a little bit (you have the horizontal pixels to waste!) so horizontal scroll does not show up.
* Hide the status bar. Most users don't look at it anyway.
* If there is only one tab, don't show the tab bar.
Or better yet, replacing Firefox with Chrome solves it once and for all.
On my netbook with Ubuntu I wanted to move the top gnome panel to the right side so I'd have more vertical space; apparently this is impossible to do cleanly.
We have wide screens now, and a lack of vertical space. The solution seems obvious to me; don't take up vertical space with desktop UI and move it to the side instead.
I love the gnome-shell, but I'd love it more if I could get those top pixels back. On a netbook, every little bit counts.
>On my netbook with Ubuntu I wanted to move the top gnome panel to the right side so I'd have more vertical space; apparently this is impossible to do cleanly.
I tried this with the past four versions of Ubuntu (8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and 10.04) on my Aspire One. In the first three cases I went back to a top or bottom panel because the side panel was ugly and unusable. With 10.04, a right-side panel is actually decent for the first time. It's not great - e.g. the shutdown applet is still too wide and doesn't flip vertically - but it's decent.
Seriously, Open Source marketing should be improved in this level of detail. Yes netbooks have shallow screens, then why wasting 145 precious vertical pixels to show non-content controls on a web browser window only 428 pixels high?
Some naive ways to improve the impression:
* Make the browser window taller, preferably taking all available vertical space. Present more web content when you really want to improve the web experience. (Right now I can only see the big heading of NYT, not really interesting.)
* Bundle one of those Hide Menu plugin to kill menu bar. How often do you really need it? And when you do need it, just click one button on the url bar to summon it.
* Choose a page that is slightly narrower or widen the window a little bit (you have the horizontal pixels to waste!) so horizontal scroll does not show up.
* Hide the status bar. Most users don't look at it anyway.
* If there is only one tab, don't show the tab bar.
Or better yet, replacing Firefox with Chrome solves it once and for all.