When Stuck in Full Screen Mode using Chrome in Ubuntu

For the people who don't want to read the whole story...

Try changing your screen resolution...

and see if it works...

Recently I had this problem where my Chrome browser started in full screen mode for no reason and wouldn't let me return to normal mode in Ubuntu 11.10. Simply stuck in full screen mode. Normally the f11 button should toggle between full screen mode and normal mode but it didn't work. Also when you hover your mouse cursor at the top of the screen while the browser is in full screen mode a small slide down button with a message "You have gone full screen mode. Exit full screen(f11)" would appear so that the user would know what to do to return to normal mode. The text in the button "Exit full screen(f11)" part is also clickable so that the user doesn't have to press the keyboard. Nonetheless, that didn't work either.

So I did some googling as usual. Some people were already having that problem, so it seemed like a well know problem. Seemed like also the Chromium browser(Chromium is project branched from Chrome) was suffering from that problem too. Anyway, there were some solutions regarding to modifying the configuration settings file. See here for more detail on solving the problem.

For Chromium browser the configuration file is located at

~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences

For Google Chrome it is located at

~/.config/google-chrome/Local State

I've tried modifying the file as instructed from the page which I googled but I had no luck. Thinking about it now, I think I was modifying the Chromium browser's configuration file while I was having the problem on Chrome browser...

However, lucky me, I still manged to solve the problem and it is a much simpler solution for the novice(not that I'm an expert). What I did was simply change the screen resolution and start Chrome. In my case the browser started in normal mode and toggling between full screen mode and normal mode was functioning correctly. So I returned back to the screen resolution I usually use.

Problem solved.