> Vertical screen space was very precious when Chrome came out. I remember their first feature over Firefox was moving tabs into the title bar and removing the menu bar, bookmark bar and bottom status bar, so saving about four bars of space for page contents.

Was it really? When Netscape Navigator came out, 640x480 was probably the most common resolution. It used significantly more vertical space than Chrome has ever done. What happened between then and the release of chrome to make vertical space more precious?

Desktop computers have had very abundant screen-space for a long time.