Here is a follow-up to my earlier post. Thanks goes out to Phil Wels for getting me the needed screenshots so that I can finish the comparison.
These screenshots were gathered from an 11″ MacBook Air with OS X Mavericks and the latest Firefox. Since Apple added an explicit full-screen mode since OS X 10.7, I have two images for comparison (and you can find the GNOME 3 and GNOME 2 screenshots in the old post).
I can definitely understand why Apple added the full-screen mode. When you split things up you get the following numbers:
- Windowed content height: 660 pixels
- Full-screen content height: 704 pixels
That’s a big difference.
Even more significant (in my eyes) is that it validates my gut feeling from earlier. OS X, even when using a regular Firefox window, shows more content than GNOME 3 (and even a few pixels more than GNOME 2). When you take into consideration the full-screen Firefox, then it gets to be ridiculous.
If I did my math correctly, you get the following:
- openSUSE 13.1 GNOME 3: 634 pixels or baseline
- SLED 11 GNOME 2: 23 pixels or 3.63% more
- OS X 10.9 (windowed): 26 pixels or 4.10% more
- OS X 10.9 (full-screen): 70 pixels or 11.04% more
You can see the advantage full-screen has on OS X 10.9. Of course, this matters the most on the smallest of screens (in height), and 768 pixels is about as small as they come … but it does show much GNOME 3 does crowd out content more than GNOME 2 and OS X.