Now Playing on the Big Screen
I'm presently working on an Internet application , and have been able to restrict usage to Internet Explorer 4.0. However, one issue that has been raised again and again is would we be able to dynamically hide the user's taskbar or force the browser to go to full screen mode using either JavaScript or VBScript.
The reply:
So your application is ready for the big screen? Maybe it had humble beginnings as a stand-alone Win32 application, but now has garnered that special star quality that can be experienced completely only in full-screen Internet Explorer? Okay, we'll cut to the chase.
From script within a page, you can open up a new full-screen browser window, using the open method of the window object. One of the parameters that you can pass in is fullscreen=yes. This mode hides the browser's title bar and menus. The script to do this would look similar to the following:
window.open "http://example.microsoft.com, "", "fullscreen=yes"
This opens up a new, full-screen browser window in addition to the current one where the script runs. You can either leave the original browser window open, and have the user manually close it after closing the full-screen window, or you can close the original window by calling window.close after calling window.open.
But when you try to close the window this way, Internet Explorer will display a dialog box warning that script is trying to close the window. This is a good thing from a security perspective, but could be a little distracting to the user of your application.
One thing to keep in mind is that when you remove all of Internet Explorer's toolbars and menus by opening a window in full-screen mode, you need to have a clear way for the user to close the window (your application). You should probably include a button to close the window, or include a note that reminds the user they can close the window by pressing ALT+F4 on the keyboard.
Another approach to getting the behavior that you want is to just start your application using the kiosk mode of Internet Explorer, rather than using script. To start Internet Explorer in kiosk (full-screen) mode, you include the -k command line option when starting IEXPLORE.EXE, such as the following:
iexplore -k example.microsoft.com
Full screen big screen internet application IE javascript vbscript browser window
