pet peeve: full-screen + multi-monitor
I'm noticing silverlight pick up a behavior from flash that I don't like: kicking out of full-screen when there's a click on the other monitor (or other loss of focus from the plugin). Now, if it's full-screen and there's only 1 monitor, then I guess that's fine. But in my case, I'm working/clicking on another monitor, but it still exits the full-screen. That's annoying.
Flash does this for me on sites like Hulu where I typically want to throw up last night's Colbert Report on a monitor while continuing to work on a second monitor. No luck, though - any actual clicking after clicking full-screen (like, to shift focus back to another app) kills the full-screen.
Same for silverlight, unfortunately. For instance, hitting the Getting Started video, I wanted to have it full-screen on one monitor and play around with silverlight in VS on the other.
In the silverlight case, at least, the video is also available in other formats, so I can open the wmv version in WMP, either standalone or in the browser (so any argument of "browser plugins can't shouldn't behave that way" is gone, IMHO) and at least *that* app doesn't exit full-screen when other things are done on another monitor.
It's almost 2009 people! Let's have some more love for multi-monitor setups! Silverlight 2.0 having this behavior really strikes me as odd (and a little disappointing). Maybe the key Silverlight people are all rocking laptops and don't have this problem like I do :)
Are others hating this behavior like I am? Sure. Enough to change the behavior? Given how long Flash has called this By Design, I'm not very hopeful for that plugin, but maybe Silverlight can at least change, although since 2.0 has already shipped, it'll probably be awhile even if it does :)
- https://www.wowzamedia.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3319
- https://help.youtube.com/group/youtube-howto/browse_thread/thread/4687210aef758024
- Note that here a guy from YouTube says this is By Design behavior for the plugin because of a security issue, but I'm personally not buying that argument, especially in light of the multi-monitor trade-off it causes.
- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189023(VS.95).aspx
- It goes double for Silverlight, since "A Silverlight plug-in can enable full-screen mode only in response to a user-initiated action" (for all I know, that may be true for Flash as well). As that page mentions, this specifically avoids the Flash security argument - "This prevents malicious applications from spoofing the appearance of the operating system or other programs."
- However, this same page says the current behavior is By Design
- "A Silverlight plug-in in full-screen mode can lose focus in a multi-monitor configuration when another window gains focus through a user action"
- https://www.phwinfo.com/forum/macromedia-flash/280820-flash-player-full-screen.html
- This mentions an offline app that will get you the behavior, but IMHO that's a ridiculous workaround to push onto the customer
Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of other offenders in this bucket (DreamScene, for instance, pauses on all monitors when there's a window is maximized on any of them), but Flash and Silverlight are the ones that cause me the most daily pain :)