[Discuss] FYI: Firefox, dual monitors (differently sized), and initial window size setting

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

At last nights BLU meeting, I reported an odd problem that I was
having with Firefox clipping the size of new windows in a dual monitor
environment to the smaller of the width/height of either monitor.
This was with several versions of Firefox (3.6 and 14) from various
sources on my Ubuntu 10.04 system.   Among other suggestions to fix
the problem was to have my window manager force Firefox's newly
created windows to a particular size when they are initially created.

I'm using the Compiz window manager with Gnome and after some time
spent reading documentation was able to do so using the "Window Rules"
extension.  WindowRules can be configured with the Compiz Config
Settings Manager ("ccsm") which is in the
compizconfig-settings-manager package.

This web page documents WindowRules and how to do window matching and
fixed size windows with the Compiz window manager:

http://wiki.compiz.org/WindowMatching/

It even gives an example of how to force Firefox windows to a
particular size.   After trying a number of different matching
options, I elected not to use their Firefox window matching pattern
and instead went with:

type=normal & name=Navigator & class=Firefox & !state=maxvert & !state=maxhorz

My matching rule allows new Firefox windows that are trying to
maximize themselves to the screen they are on to do so, while the
example on the web page was having problems with this.  There may be
other cases were their rule is preferable or maybe something else
entirely, but  this should be a good start for anyone who has this
problem.  In any case, I hope that someone finds this helpful in the
future and thanks for all the suggestions last night.

Bill Bogstad