Dock Hiding Help

Ok so I just switched to my first Mac. A MacBook Pro 13" base model. I have one question about using the dock the way I would like to. Right now I have the dock on the bottom of the screen and set to hide unless I mouse around the bottom of the screen. I like this so that I can have Firefox maximized to take up the whole screen. However, I wold like to show the dock on the desktop when I don't have any windows maximized.

So I guess my question is this. Is there a way to set the dock to automatically hide when windows are maximized on the screen and then have the dock automatically show when there are no windows open or maximized?

 

Yeah, I've made my dock really small and set the magnification to be really big. This solution is something I can get used to and be ok with. I'm just coming from using Windows 7 and that OS has a really great taskbar.