Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle.
Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.
> it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle
IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.
Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.
While I don't maximize anything on a monitor that wide, I do appreciate Window's snap to half/quarter functionality for monitors that wide, and I wish Mac had the same ability natively.
Hover over the green button in the top left of the window. I recently found out about that menu for moving a window between screens, which is also an option it has. (I also just found them in the Window menu if you prefer that. I dont; the options take an extra level of hovering to get to.)
You can also long-click the button instead of hovering. Also, see the menu bar entries related to window management, which replicates these same functions but can be bound to keys in the system settings.
I’m pretty sure it does? I haven’t installed anything and it has the ability to do half and some other layouts through the window menu and snapping IIRC
I just installed Kubuntu last week so I could get the additional shift-drag targets to split my 34" ultrawide into 3 sections, or bump to the edges for the half filled.
Something I realized after spending a few months in sway (i3) and then niri is that I only care about a few windows (code editor, terminal, browser, apps I use moment to moment).
All the rest I'd prefer to just summon as-needed and then dismiss without navigating away from the windows I care about.
sway/niri want me to tile every window into some top-level spot.
Took me a while to admit it, but the usual Windows/macOS/DE "stacking" method is what I want + a few hotkeys to arrange the few windows I care about.
macOS only recently got an option to make windows fill the screen. For most of history what most people would assume is a maximize button (the green one) was actually a zoom button. It sized the window to what the OS thought was appropriate for the content (to the best of my knowledge and experience with it).
Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full screen mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.
By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way Windows does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked its way out of my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and I find very few apps where it provides much benefit. Web browsers, for example, often end up with a lot of useless whitespace on the sides of the page, so they work better as a smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE, it really depends on what’s being worked on and if text wrapping is something I want. Ideally lines wouldn’t get so long that this is a problem.
With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to have my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking out, so I can move between app windows in one click. The alternative is bringing every window of an app to the front (with the Dock or cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for everything, neither of which feels efficient.
I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I suppose, but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out a workflow that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system without going through a setup process to customize everything. It’s the same reason I never seriously got into alternative keyboard layouts.
Right, Macs always have had the premise of "spacial window management" (or that's what Siracusa called it), so that's probably how you are 'supposed to' do it.
Full Screen Mode was their answer to maximize, going back many years now (10.7).
You can double click the grab handle area of a window (which is less obvious than ever in Tahoe) and it'll fill the window to the display.
Except Safari, which just fills out the window's height vertically. Kinda weird to make an exception like that but I don't hate it, because I generally use Safari for reading, and shrinking the browser's width forces lines of text to not get too long if the website's styling isn't setting that manually.
You can double click on any part of the top title bar (that doesn't have buttons in it) for example in Calendar you can double click beside the magnifying glass in the top right and it will maximize the window.
This is running "zoom". When I try it in Finder, it doesn't make the window full screen, it actually made it smaller.
When I use the Window menu, Zoom replicates what double-clicking the top title bar does, while Fill maximizes the window. This holds true with the behavior you describe in Safari as well.
It just seems like a lot of apps treat Zoom and Fill the same now (I tried Calendar, Notes, TextEdit, and NetNewsWire), which adds to the confusion.
Lion got Full screen, but Fill screen came later. Best I can tell, that was in Yosemite, 11 years ago. That still feels relatively recent, as it is in their current California landmarks era and no the big cats era.
Just wanted to note that this is how I work. I rarely have any window full screen/maximized and hate it when a website or application is built assuming a giant monitor with a maximized window.
I’ve never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with a way to quickly switch between apps I’m using more than “editor slightly more left, browser slightly more right, …” and just clicking on a border I know brings that app to the front. I’m sure many think I’m crazy. That’s ok. :)
That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element that is non usable just became larger and wastes space I should be able to utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely frustrating (here’s looking at you, corner drag resize!).
Probably not the norm, but I use a large 4K monitor and no scaling.
I haven’t maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.
Do you have the brightness on your monitor set really high or something?
I frequently use macOS on a projector, it doesn't quite fill my wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't use full screen often, but I do it occasionally as a focusing strategy, and it's fine.
Doesn't bouncing off the wall just effectively make the "backlight" dimmer? The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.
If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight should have less of an effect.
A tiling window manager adds a bunch of keyboard shortcuts I can’t get used to. Not worth the mental load of having things change places on their own either.
It’s probably a me problem, but I’m going to open stuff and then leave it scattered around all day. It’s fine.
I don’t use more than a couple of virtual desktops either. Just one for current tasks and one for background apps.
I have three 27" screens (iMac in the center and two thunderbolt displays on each side) and I use most of my "daily driver" applications fullscreen (single monitor). So, things like Xcode, VSCode, web browsers, mail, Quicken, Spreadsheets and Word Processing, and so on. This gives me usually at most 3 things to do at once. Occasionally, for smaller apps, like calculator, messages and so on, I won't fullscreen them. But for my main workflows, it's fullscreen all the way.
My actual biggest pet peeve with this setup is the vast number of web sites that deliberately choose to limit their content to a tiny column centered horizontally in my browser, with 10cm of wasted whitespace on each side.
> Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle
The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content of the document inside.
It turns out that this approach works well for many applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.
I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12 windows open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used the Alt-Tab to get between them. Basically wherever it opened is where it stayed.
This is me. I tend to order projects onto their own desktops[0], each with several app windows open. With an external monitor there's plenty of space, and... Yeah: with command-tab thoroughly committed to muscle memory it usually doesn't matter much if they end up on top of each other. If it does, I'll put them next to each other. Stickies usually go out of my eye-line to the left side of the screen, so I'll keep that otherwise clear.
I sometimes maximize something - other than video calls: those are always full-size - on the laptop screen, but otherwise not at all.
I can see how a full-screen IDE makes sense, but I don't use one, so I always want a couple of terminal sessions running alongside my editor.
There are vanishingly few contexts in which I find full-screen helpful. Not criticizing anyone else, or recommending my way of working, but it's what works for me.
[0] I would like better support for desktop management: naming and shortcutting, particularly. Years ago I tried some (I think it was Alfred, or a predecessor) add-on that promised that, but it was super flaky. Does anything exist that works well?
This is me almost exactly. Windows pile up being whatever size feels appropriate, organized only by virtual desktop. If screen #2 is a laptop screen or the program in question is an IDE with a billion panes I might resize it to fill the screen, but otherwise it’s rare. I practically never use full-on fullscreen.
It’s so ingrained I tend to get frustrated on other desktops, which are nearly all built around the Windows mentality of keeping displays filled to the brim with tiled or maximized windows.
Even on the handful of times with maximize/tile on macOS, it’s with a gap of a few pixels of desktop peeking through so it doesn’t feel as “boxed in” and claustrophobic.
Window management is one thing that MacOS has long been weirdly bad at.
I think there's a conflict between the users who use it on studio displays and users who use it on 13 inch laptops. The Mac team at apple won't pick a side or come up with two solutions.
That's not completely true, they've been pushing swipe between fullscreen apps for a while.
But that doesn't make any sense on an iMac.
So the recommendation from pro users is to use Alfred to manage windows.
there's iconography of a partially eaten fruit on the cases, and some of them glow.
eta: i'm just saying if i had a glowing half drank beer or partially eaten pizza on my laptop in a business meeting i am getting weird looks. Just because you all normalized glowing fruit doesn't mean the rest of us take you seriously.
Yes! After many years of using only linux or windows machines, I was assigned an iMac at an internship and noticed the friction with fullscreening things. I decided not to fight it and spent the next year happily working in little windows and making frequent use of the "mission control" gesture.
However, after the internship I went right back to fullscreen/window tiling in linux, so I can't say I really preferred it. Even now as a Gnome user with a big monitor and magic trackpad on my desk - which gives me ~equal access to either approach - I fullscreen everything.
I don't know what it is, but fullscreen on Mac (even dock-showing "fullish screen") feels wrong in a way that fullscreen on Windows/Linux feels "right".
I think it’s partially because on Macs, the desktop has always been a more pivotal component of the OS thanks to ubiquitous drag and drop support and mounted volumes showing on the desktop, among other things. At least for me, it’s not unusual to grab images, text snippets, and other things from apps and drop them on my desktop, making it more of a workbench than it is on other platforms.
Another component is how ability to overlap windows is emphasized, allowing the currently relevant portion of them to be visible without taking center stage or stealing any space from your main window(s).
Both are part of a larger difference in mentality and workflow style.
When I'm using my macbook's screen, I usually expand a browser window to fill the whole screen -- it's a 13" screen so not using the whole thing makes things feel small. But most of the time my computer is plugged into an larger external monitor (20-something inches, maybe 27?), and there I don't expand any windows to fill the whole screen. I like having separate not-full-screen windows which partially (or mostly) overlap.
Somewhat relatedly, we use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy when I hop on a computer after someone's been using it and they have every single thing maximized, even Windows Explorer, on 27" monitors. A maximized browser, I get... I don't do it myself but I understand how it can be useful, but maximizing Windows Explorer is just insane to me, and yet a lot of my coworkers do it.
Some users switch apps by dragging windows around the screen, like a messy stack. A friend of mine didn't even know about Cmd+Tab to cycle through open apps. Users are weird.
I’m not trying to defend because I don’t like it either. But the Mac workflow has always been much more alt-tab focused than windows. With alt-tab and alt-shift-tab (reverse order) I feel like I can fly through my apps at the speed of thought.
Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with the expectation that they kind of just float around. But at least in Mac you can scroll on an app that isn’t in focus…
I never have any window in the fullscreen/maximized mode. Some are pretty large, such as IDE, and they sometimes touch one or more edges of the screen/dock/panel, but never occupy the entire space. That was true even on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI.
That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.
I hever have any window in fullscreen, but I always have all windows maximized (obviously except the ones that can't be maximized, because of course settings couldn't possibly be made maximizable, what, that's crazy talk).
I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half of the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one of these modes.
But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen.
It’s painful for me to watch senior engineers drag windows around and resize, hunt and peck for what they’re looking for. I suppose that’s what an emacs user may think of me when I move code around, but I suppose such things aren’t critical for overall productivity
Yes (but not for a browser). My terminal windows are 80x24, pretty much always. I do this today on Linux, I've done it through multiple versions of Windows, and I did it in my childhood on a 9" B&W "luggable" Mac screen.
Yeah this is the assumption, even pre-OSX.
I won't claim to know the majority of mac users, especially not since the large uptick in the 2010's... but it seems, in my experience, very much the norm to not maximize windows and I wouldn't be surprised if people who do maximize are mostly Windows converts (not that there's anything wrong with that).
It’s very rare that I maximize an application. I’m always stacking. However, I don’t think it’s an optimizing assumption: I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen
In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple terminal windows, eg)
Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where you do everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it full screen all the time and I get why that works for some people. I'm not one of those folks and I use separate IDE, terminal, browsers, and other windows and use window management to allow myself to see multiple of them at the same time and switch between them by clicking on what I want.
Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.
MacOS assumes you won’t full screen every app because all of them ship with large enough, high enough resolution monitors that full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space. Unlike on cheap laptops with 1080p screens.
I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope it’s rare.
I run 27" 4k and a 34" ultra wide monitors on my desktops, and my main laptop is a P16S with a 16" 3840x2400 OLED typically docked to one of those screens when not on the go, and I almost never use windows that are not snapped to fullscreen or at the very least to halves or quarters. "Large enough" scarcely applies to a MacBook Air or Neo with a 13" display, and I bet a TON of those get docked to cheap 21, 24, and 27" 1080p screens.
I'd like to be able to snap things to the middle third, especially on the ultrawides.
Only little calculator widgets, property panels, and modal dialogs that get immediately closed after use don't get maximized or at least docked to fill some region. I hate the cluttered, layered feeling of having a bunch of non-full-screen windows overlapping, I want to have a dozen apps open and making optimal use of the available display area.
I exclusive use complete fullscreen mode for apps i'm actively using and on large screens connect the workspaces, on small screen swipe back and forth. So I you never actually use that.
It depends very much on the size of the screen. On a small 13” laptop screen? Sure, you’re going to be running apps full-screen a lot of the time. On a big desktop monitor? No, except for games and playing movies, I’ll almost never expand an app to fill the entire screen.
Last time I had to work on just my laptop screen (16”), I actually found Stage Manager pretty useful. On a larger screen, or for more casual use, I do not.
I hate maximized windows. I like it when my windows are not maximized but I usually do have significant overlap between windows. Then I switch between windows based on the sliver of window that’s visible even when other windows are in focus. It’s the spatial way of thinking; just like how Finder purists think each folder on your disk should remember its own window size and location so you use your spatial memory to locate Finder windows. I find that this is significantly faster for my brain to process compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.
I would in fact say that the culture of not maximizing windows was a small reason why I switched to Mac OS X in the early 2000s.
for the longest time I never did this, but then I got a gigantic 4K screen, and I realized that it was almost giving me vertigo having apps like my IDE fullscreened, because I literally have to move my head in order to look everywhere.
so in response I changed my windowing strategy to having a set of windows floating around at exactly the size I want them, and then the advantage of the enormous screen is just how many windows I can have open at once
that being said, I use KDE not MacOS, and 90% of Mac users I'd guess are on laptops, so using this strategy sounds completely insane to me. On laptops I still default to fullscreening or "half-screening" most apps.
The window management style of Mac OS is complete chaos imo
I have been using it for years and I just gave up entirely on managing anything and if I zoom out to see all my windows it looks like the freaking Milky Way from windows I forgot
People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts they work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.
I've always disliked MacOS because it is so janky about maximizing windows.
I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I have OCD about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of each other. I like to focus on one screen at a time.
Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use that on a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting between sites, but that's about it.
I actually feel the opposite? The current green button action not only makes the window fill the entire screen, it also hides the menu bar AND creates a new virtual desktop and hides all of my other apps. And it seems to me that's what the majority of people want.
Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple applications at the same time.
One issue with windows maximised with the green button is if you have more than 1 window of the same app: you might alt-tab to the app, but cmd-` is not switching to the other window of the same (while id does if not maximised.
I honestly can't say I've ever seen a non-techie expand a window to full screen using the green button on macOS. I'm not sure why, because in theory, I agree with you.
In my experience supporting Mac users, it's about 50/50. I think a lot of them have been conditioned to not maximize windows because it hides everything else, and they don't understand how to get back to their other windows.
I use a MacBook and a Mac mini personally, and I do not generally maximize any application that isn't implicitly a full-screen experience (e.g. a video player or a computer game).
I think it’s more of a carryover from the original Mac’s in the 80s.
Trying to maximize a window, even 23 years ago when I first moved to OS X, was a completely manual process. It was designed around windows, not walls. And screens were much smaller and lower res back then.
In the office I have dual 24" monitors. At home I have a single 38" ultrawide. In desktop mode I almost never have one app taking up my full screen. In portable mode yeah, all full screen. The only exception is IDEs which get their own spaces and are basically self-contained tiling window managers anyway.
Yeah, anything that has an MDI metaphor going on should be ran fullscreen. Otherwise, what's the point? If the idea is to use the OS desktop space as the application window organizational space, then don't let people make apps that have different document panes.
This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while: at some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system vendors abdicated their responsibility to innovate on interaction metaphors.
What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized by Web browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and Firefox had to go out of their way to render tabs; there was no support built into the OS.
The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different from what we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there has been almost no progress in the last 25 years. What change there has been feels like it could have been accomplished in user-space, plus it doesn't get applied consistently across applications, thus making it feel like not a core part of the OS.
MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop environment being the space of window and document level manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did not have their own menubars. All application menu bars were integrated together at the top of the screen. Why should it be any different with any other UI organizational feature? Should not apps merely be a single window pane, accomplishing a single thing, and you combine multiple apps together to get something akin to an IDE out of them?
Well, I don't know if they should be. But they can't. Because OS vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even after signalling they wanted it.
It did, but those were static tabs. It was pretty easy to create tabs as a form of sub-organization. But the treatment of tabs as documents was new-ish to Chrome/Firefox. Other applications treated multiple, concurrent document views as whole, resizable, sub windows inside of an "MDI" panel.
Look at how older versions of Word, Excel, and Visual Studio worked. The tool trays stay consistant as you move between document windows. The entire application is minimizable and quittable together as one.
Photoshop still uses this metaphor. In the ealry and mid-2000s, Photoshop on Windows had a window for the application separate from the documents, but on Apple OS9 and OSX, the only representation of the application itself was in the menu bar. Document windows and tooltray windows both floated in the same desktop space as every other window.
I haven't checked on the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but I seem to remember it retained the same "no application window, tooltrays and doc windows exist in the DE" metaphor for much longer than Photoshop.
There is also a difference in the way that Chrome renders tabs in the window title area. That's a part of the UI chrome that one would expect to be in the perview of the UI toolkit, but Google took it on themselves.
Virtual desktops in Unix predate Visual Studio. I'm pretty sure there was a concept of tabbed interfaces somewhere in the Amiga or BeOS or any other OS.
What does that have to do with my criticism of the two most popular operating system that they failed to innovate or adapt in areas that showed obvious need?
Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird.
My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which helped a lot. There are countless other little tweaks that are worth investigating.
I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with WindowServer or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu), but it's something.
I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window, to switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then something is terribly wrong. Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades, but now it's reaching the point where daily work is becoming difficult.
I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we can finally boot up with better alternatives that force Apple/Microsoft/Google to try again. I could see Finder or File Explorer alternatives replacing the native ones.
But apps shouldn't be able to hammer WindowServer in the first place. If your app is misbehaving, your app should hang, not the OS window compositor!
FWIU there's really no backpressure mechanism for apps delegating compositing (via CoreAnimation / CALayers) to WindowServer which is the real problem IMO.
QubesOS seems a great migration target: it runs Apps/OS in secure sandboxes - and even with that overhead doesn't seem worse than the terrible MacOS 26 performance.
I'm not a fan of the look in Tahoe (especially Apple Music wtf happened there) but most of it I can totally ignore, and don't even notice anymore. Except for the tabs. I have Sequoia and Tahoe machines, and the tabs in Tahoe are so unbelievably bad in comparison. Like this ugly pill shape. I rarely hear this get brought up but they're astonishingly ugly, worse than the previous design in every way.
That’s funny to call Mac OS a hack compared to windows. Now windows is trying to be backward compatible with DOS and that’s… something. But when we read blog posts explaining why things are how they are in windows i always get the heebie jeebies.
Well sure we can compare it to niche OS like Linux or vaporware. But without comparison then we probably aren’t taking into account the real life complexity of a desktop OS.
As a related anecdote, my friend said my car was ugly. I asked him what cars he thought looked good. He said “I don’t like cars”. As a result I realized his opinion was worthless
You can compare it to prior versions of macOS, if you insist on assessing it from a relativistic standpoint. Apple didn't have this issue 10 years ago.
Eh, it might be or it might not, why is that a valid indication that everything else is wack? There certainly are other things that are bad, maybe many, evidently, but I don't think the corner problem is a fair indicator of that exactly. Numerous things can be discretely bad and poorly directed without there being some ebola virus of bad throughout
> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of the start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".
In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency - or inject some to form this argument on purpose as a manufacturer.
People don't like if their environment changes in minor unsolicited ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these things and that means that the fuzz itself can't be used to make any strong argument whatsoever.
It’s not only that it’s opinionated, it’s that it’s idiosyncratically opinionated. It would be different if it had a boring, middle-of-the-road opinion.
It's not that it's idiosyncratically opinionated, it's that its idiosyncratic opinion is insane, user-hostile, and flies in the face of decades of experience crafting user interfaces.
I was thinking the same thing. I actually agree with most of the complaints people have made about the corners, but it seems so small compared with literally every interaction I have with Windows.
As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands alone in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on" of operating systems.
Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost feels like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among graphic designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS users will never notice or care.
On the other hand the fact that it sometimes makes it hard to resize windows means that it breaks something that Apple operating systems have been capable of doing without issue for nearly 45 years.
> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.
I think you miss the point. How would you feel if you had a Ferrari with a noticeable scratch? Yes, it is great to have such a nice car, but it'd be a pity. So much much effort was put into the whole thing and this little detail is what lingers on your mind.
This is not the biggest flaw, this is just the most recent flaw.
MacOS has been shit for as long as I've used it (8 years) and probably for much longer than that. There are many lists available of MacOS problems (https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/12rw1sn/a_long_list_... for example), it's just that there's not much point making a new article about the Finder that's been shit, and unchanged, for a decade.
Clearing notifications on macOS Tahoe is ridiculously tedious. The "Liquid Glass" button is slow to respond, the notifications hang for a bit before being cleared, and then sometimes you have to jiggle the cursor to clear the next one. It's absurdly frustrating.
And the updates to Music (formerly iTunes) are so bad the entire team should be dressed down, Steve Jobs style.
I love that there are people who are observant enough to notice these kinds of things, a vanguard for those of us who are blithely unaware and protected due to their vigilance.
Apple used to know this. You don't notice these things, but your subconscious does. You start to trust it less when things get inconsistent and don't "just work".
I usually use Linux and Windows (pretty much split 50/50) and tbh this is why I never could switch to Mac full time even though I've have had and still have several Macs at home. The full screen beahavior is weird. Is the dock should overlay every single window all the time? If not then why is the dock not hidden by default? If yes then full screen is actually "maximum size app window without overlaying the dock"? What's even the point of the dock actually? The other one is the open window =/= running app behavior. Wait 2 hours later this app is still running in the background even though I've closed all windows?
In other words, MacOS is fine as long as you're undiscerning and not at all detail-oriented. Imagine telling Steve Jobs that this was the prevailing attitude needed to make using a Mac bearable.
i use a an auto-layout tool, so having windows stacked on top of each other is super-common for me, and the fact that they all peak thru each other (like the screenshot in the blog) looking absolutely terrible drives me crazy
To me it's a little like the situation with charging the Mighty Mouse. It's become a meme to post a picture of it on its side being charged, but if you own one it doesn't really matter, as you charge it once a month for 15 minutes while you're at lunch.
There are things which definitely do bother me like the Liquid Glass, but the window corners really don't bother me. And I'm into design and constantly inspect parts of ui with Digital Color Meter app.
The pill tabs are what get me too. I can ignore most visual changes after a while, but those somehow manage to feel both more distracting and less informative at the same time.
With only a little sense of self aware irony, one thing I hate about so much dialog these days is how vehement opinions are. I don't particularly like the rounded corners, and think it's a regression. It's also... fine. It's not the difference between usable and entirely unusable. And I see this kind of attitude all over the place now. A slight change, some slightly non-ideal behavior and all of a sudden a product is THE WORST THING EVER. We will be ok with inconsistently rounded windows. I think people need to be a bit more tolerant of design decisions that are opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking.
I feel the opposite. macOS has had excellent UI in the past, and the rationale was usually that Apple took designer feedback seriously. Designers told Apple that advertisements in the notification menu was a no-no, they warned about layering text on low-contrast glass effects. They stopped OSX' UI from becoming visually bloated and low-density like the eventual Big Sur+ design language. We only get these kinds of issues when the chain of communication is cut: https://noheger.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/scrambled...https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-...
If you want ads in Spotlight or Launchpad, telling people to tolerate "opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking" features is exactly how you get it. It's how Windows got there.
One of my claude code projects was going to be "theghostofsteve", a social media platform where people post things they love and hate about appleOS things. Likes/Dislikes would be "genius/it's shit". And in all likelihood, the platform would surface that most users think "it's shit."
The platform would aggregate by major/minor version, and you could see in totality whether the current version of macOS/iOS would make Steve proud of miserable.
Ultimately I decided against it, for defamation/cease-and-desist reasons, and not wanting to find out. But it needs to exist.
In window management, anything other than i3 is an unequivocal downgrade.
Rounded corners are just...bizarre. Just because the laptop casing is physically rounded !? (Yet the menubar squares it off off at the top, and the bezel squares it off on the bottom...)
Windows gets a lot of (deserved) bad rap for bloatware but MacOS is just a little less bad. "Features" that we can't uninstall (e.g.: Siri, Apple Music), arbitrary changes in the UI, ...
True, the "blessing" of forced online accounts, telemetry and advertisement didn't arrive to MacOS, yet. But, I wonder how long it will take us to get there.
> disabling MacOS system integrity [protection], which results in making them possibly vulnerable
Not really, if you have malware that has root access on your system I think you're already pretty screwed, especially considering that you don't even need root to read all your saved passwords and personal files https://xkcd.com/1200/
As tumblr user ommanyte said, "how dull for you to live your life without any hills to die on, you, on your vast flat barren plains of compromise, acceptance, and accommodation, while I reign supreme over the lush, rolling highlands of stupid shit I have irrationally chosen to stake my entire identity on"
I've been using Tahoe since the beta and the borders haven't bothered me once.
I get the UI consistency thing but it's okay to transition to new UI things gradually than making radical changes all at once. If this is still an issue 2yrs from now it will be more of a concern about their commitment.
Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.
IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.
Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.
Browsers only ever get maximized to the left/right half screen for me too
Which is something macos should really improve on though, the ux is pretty bad compared to Windows and Linux there
Hover over the green button in the top left of the window. I recently found out about that menu for moving a window between screens, which is also an option it has. (I also just found them in the Window menu if you prefer that. I dont; the options take an extra level of hovering to get to.)
I maximize windows of graphics and video editors.
All the rest I'd prefer to just summon as-needed and then dismiss without navigating away from the windows I care about.
sway/niri want me to tile every window into some top-level spot.
Took me a while to admit it, but the usual Windows/macOS/DE "stacking" method is what I want + a few hotkeys to arrange the few windows I care about.
[1]: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite [2]: https://github.com/paulmcauley/klassy
Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full screen mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.
By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way Windows does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked its way out of my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and I find very few apps where it provides much benefit. Web browsers, for example, often end up with a lot of useless whitespace on the sides of the page, so they work better as a smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE, it really depends on what’s being worked on and if text wrapping is something I want. Ideally lines wouldn’t get so long that this is a problem.
With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to have my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking out, so I can move between app windows in one click. The alternative is bringing every window of an app to the front (with the Dock or cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for everything, neither of which feels efficient.
I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I suppose, but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out a workflow that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system without going through a setup process to customize everything. It’s the same reason I never seriously got into alternative keyboard layouts.
Full Screen Mode was their answer to maximize, going back many years now (10.7).
Except Safari, which just fills out the window's height vertically. Kinda weird to make an exception like that but I don't hate it, because I generally use Safari for reading, and shrinking the browser's width forces lines of text to not get too long if the website's styling isn't setting that manually.
When I use the Window menu, Zoom replicates what double-clicking the top title bar does, while Fill maximizes the window. This holds true with the behavior you describe in Safari as well.
It just seems like a lot of apps treat Zoom and Fill the same now (I tried Calendar, Notes, TextEdit, and NetNewsWire), which adds to the confusion.
I’ve never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with a way to quickly switch between apps I’m using more than “editor slightly more left, browser slightly more right, …” and just clicking on a border I know brings that app to the front. I’m sure many think I’m crazy. That’s ok. :)
That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element that is non usable just became larger and wastes space I should be able to utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely frustrating (here’s looking at you, corner drag resize!).
I haven’t maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.
If I ever accidentally full screen a window, and it’s not in night mode, I am instantly blinded by a wall of mostly white empty background!
I frequently use macOS on a projector, it doesn't quite fill my wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't use full screen often, but I do it occasionally as a focusing strategy, and it's fine.
You're shining a bright light on a wall, which you are looking at.
With a monitor you are shining a bright light at your face, while staring directly at the lightbulb!
If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight should have less of an effect.
It’s probably a me problem, but I’m going to open stuff and then leave it scattered around all day. It’s fine.
I don’t use more than a couple of virtual desktops either. Just one for current tasks and one for background apps.
My actual biggest pet peeve with this setup is the vast number of web sites that deliberately choose to limit their content to a tiny column centered horizontally in my browser, with 10cm of wasted whitespace on each side.
The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content of the document inside.
It turns out that this approach works well for many applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.
I sometimes maximize something - other than video calls: those are always full-size - on the laptop screen, but otherwise not at all.
I can see how a full-screen IDE makes sense, but I don't use one, so I always want a couple of terminal sessions running alongside my editor.
There are vanishingly few contexts in which I find full-screen helpful. Not criticizing anyone else, or recommending my way of working, but it's what works for me.
[0] I would like better support for desktop management: naming and shortcutting, particularly. Years ago I tried some (I think it was Alfred, or a predecessor) add-on that promised that, but it was super flaky. Does anything exist that works well?
It’s so ingrained I tend to get frustrated on other desktops, which are nearly all built around the Windows mentality of keeping displays filled to the brim with tiled or maximized windows.
Even on the handful of times with maximize/tile on macOS, it’s with a gap of a few pixels of desktop peeking through so it doesn’t feel as “boxed in” and claustrophobic.
I think there's a conflict between the users who use it on studio displays and users who use it on 13 inch laptops. The Mac team at apple won't pick a side or come up with two solutions.
That's not completely true, they've been pushing swipe between fullscreen apps for a while.
But that doesn't make any sense on an iMac.
So the recommendation from pro users is to use Alfred to manage windows.
I can’t tell if this is a serious comment or humor.
eta: i'm just saying if i had a glowing half drank beer or partially eaten pizza on my laptop in a business meeting i am getting weird looks. Just because you all normalized glowing fruit doesn't mean the rest of us take you seriously.
However, after the internship I went right back to fullscreen/window tiling in linux, so I can't say I really preferred it. Even now as a Gnome user with a big monitor and magic trackpad on my desk - which gives me ~equal access to either approach - I fullscreen everything.
Another component is how ability to overlap windows is emphasized, allowing the currently relevant portion of them to be visible without taking center stage or stealing any space from your main window(s).
Both are part of a larger difference in mentality and workflow style.
Somewhat relatedly, we use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy when I hop on a computer after someone's been using it and they have every single thing maximized, even Windows Explorer, on 27" monitors. A maximized browser, I get... I don't do it myself but I understand how it can be useful, but maximizing Windows Explorer is just insane to me, and yet a lot of my coworkers do it.
Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with the expectation that they kind of just float around. But at least in Mac you can scroll on an app that isn’t in focus…
That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.
But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen.
[1] https://rectangleapp.com/
Yes (but not for a browser). My terminal windows are 80x24, pretty much always. I do this today on Linux, I've done it through multiple versions of Windows, and I did it in my childhood on a 9" B&W "luggable" Mac screen.
I just like it, okay?
In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple terminal windows, eg)
Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.
I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope it’s rare.
I'd like to be able to snap things to the middle third, especially on the ultrawides.
Only little calculator widgets, property panels, and modal dialogs that get immediately closed after use don't get maximized or at least docked to fill some region. I hate the cluttered, layered feeling of having a bunch of non-full-screen windows overlapping, I want to have a dozen apps open and making optimal use of the available display area.
I would in fact say that the culture of not maximizing windows was a small reason why I switched to Mac OS X in the early 2000s.
so in response I changed my windowing strategy to having a set of windows floating around at exactly the size I want them, and then the advantage of the enormous screen is just how many windows I can have open at once
that being said, I use KDE not MacOS, and 90% of Mac users I'd guess are on laptops, so using this strategy sounds completely insane to me. On laptops I still default to fullscreening or "half-screening" most apps.
As you said, browser and IDE are the big exceptions, plus things like Lightroom or my 3d printer's slicer.
Even VS Code usually lives as a smaller window when I'm using more a text editor rather than as an IDE.
I have been using it for years and I just gave up entirely on managing anything and if I zoom out to see all my windows it looks like the freaking Milky Way from windows I forgot
I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I have OCD about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of each other. I like to focus on one screen at a time.
Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use that on a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting between sites, but that's about it.
Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple applications at the same time.
Trying to maximize a window, even 23 years ago when I first moved to OS X, was a completely manual process. It was designed around windows, not walls. And screens were much smaller and lower res back then.
This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while: at some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system vendors abdicated their responsibility to innovate on interaction metaphors.
What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized by Web browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and Firefox had to go out of their way to render tabs; there was no support built into the OS.
The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different from what we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there has been almost no progress in the last 25 years. What change there has been feels like it could have been accomplished in user-space, plus it doesn't get applied consistently across applications, thus making it feel like not a core part of the OS.
MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop environment being the space of window and document level manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did not have their own menubars. All application menu bars were integrated together at the top of the screen. Why should it be any different with any other UI organizational feature? Should not apps merely be a single window pane, accomplishing a single thing, and you combine multiple apps together to get something akin to an IDE out of them?
Well, I don't know if they should be. But they can't. Because OS vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even after signalling they wanted it.
Look at how older versions of Word, Excel, and Visual Studio worked. The tool trays stay consistant as you move between document windows. The entire application is minimizable and quittable together as one.
Photoshop still uses this metaphor. In the ealry and mid-2000s, Photoshop on Windows had a window for the application separate from the documents, but on Apple OS9 and OSX, the only representation of the application itself was in the menu bar. Document windows and tooltray windows both floated in the same desktop space as every other window.
I haven't checked on the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but I seem to remember it retained the same "no application window, tooltrays and doc windows exist in the DE" metaphor for much longer than Photoshop.
There is also a difference in the way that Chrome renders tabs in the window title area. That's a part of the UI chrome that one would expect to be in the perview of the UI toolkit, but Google took it on themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)
Don Hopkins himself can enlighten us about it (NeWS) better than me literally anyone in this thread, jut wait.
My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which helped a lot. There are countless other little tweaks that are worth investigating.
I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with WindowServer or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu), but it's something.
I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window, to switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then something is terribly wrong. Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades, but now it's reaching the point where daily work is becoming difficult.
I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we can finally boot up with better alternatives that force Apple/Microsoft/Google to try again. I could see Finder or File Explorer alternatives replacing the native ones.
That's because some app is spamming window updates.
It's been an ongoing problem for many releases. AFAICT, WindowServer 100% CPU is a symptom, not a cause.
FWIU there's really no backpressure mechanism for apps delegating compositing (via CoreAnimation / CALayers) to WindowServer which is the real problem IMO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282085#47310011
Probably my least favorite redesign in the whole update. Why is everything an oval? It's just bizarre.
If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise.
On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's tendency to bike-shed.
Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we know the whole thing is a hack.
I never said that
As a related anecdote, my friend said my car was ugly. I asked him what cars he thought looked good. He said “I don’t like cars”. As a result I realized his opinion was worthless
For example, there is not much you could do to Finder to make it worse.
This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of the start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".
In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency - or inject some to form this argument on purpose as a manufacturer.
People don't like if their environment changes in minor unsolicited ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these things and that means that the fuzz itself can't be used to make any strong argument whatsoever.
That’s way more than just the “position of the start menu”
As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands alone in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on" of operating systems.
There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.
MacOS has been shit for as long as I've used it (8 years) and probably for much longer than that. There are many lists available of MacOS problems (https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/12rw1sn/a_long_list_... for example), it's just that there's not much point making a new article about the Finder that's been shit, and unchanged, for a decade.
And the updates to Music (formerly iTunes) are so bad the entire team should be dressed down, Steve Jobs style.
There are things which definitely do bother me like the Liquid Glass, but the window corners really don't bother me. And I'm into design and constantly inspect parts of ui with Digital Color Meter app.
What does it say?
It doesn't render for me either, but is in the HTML at path...
.../html/body/div/div/main/div[3]/div[6]/div/div[2]/div/p
Edit: SIP has a series of control bits for a diverse set of protections. You can see what these control (and which bits "csrutil disable" toggles) in this include file: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/f6217f89...
Ads in a start menu can die in a fire though.
If you want ads in Spotlight or Launchpad, telling people to tolerate "opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking" features is exactly how you get it. It's how Windows got there.
The platform would aggregate by major/minor version, and you could see in totality whether the current version of macOS/iOS would make Steve proud of miserable.
Ultimately I decided against it, for defamation/cease-and-desist reasons, and not wanting to find out. But it needs to exist.
Rounded corners are just...bizarre. Just because the laptop casing is physically rounded !? (Yet the menubar squares it off off at the top, and the bezel squares it off on the bottom...)
True, the "blessing" of forced online accounts, telemetry and advertisement didn't arrive to MacOS, yet. But, I wonder how long it will take us to get there.
Not really, if you have malware that has root access on your system I think you're already pretty screwed, especially considering that you don't even need root to read all your saved passwords and personal files https://xkcd.com/1200/
I get the UI consistency thing but it's okay to transition to new UI things gradually than making radical changes all at once. If this is still an issue 2yrs from now it will be more of a concern about their commitment.