Safari still seems the best on the Mac, with Chrome for cross-platform use.
(Click the screenshot to get the full size version.)
With screens seeming to get wider, it surprises me how much extra vertical space many browsers use for the control area. The first impression with IE 8 (not shown) was that they wanted a third of my screen for their ads and other crap.
Next steps are maybe to allow you to hide the control area except on mouseover and to make it sticky with mouseover + click. Maybe that’s already doable, but just not self-evidently obvious to configure. Maybe it’s an awful suggestion.
Sebastien Najjar suggests putting control areas (docks, etc.) down the side of the screen.
Figments of a lack of imagination