For all his infamy, Jobs held Apple together in large part through his uncompromising perfectionism and attention to the kind of details that have since been demoted to "we'll fix it in the next version" or the equivalent of "# temporary". Every company is a bit of an ant-farm, but this one either has no single queen to lay down the law, or the queen is "trying things out" :P
Jobs used to laugh at Microsoft for all manner of inconsistencies in behaviour and user experience with Windows, but now Apple is contending with the same problem, in part due to exposure as macOS has never been so popular and prevalent, and now there are ever growing amount of eyes calling them out for those inconsistencies that have been appearing more and more frequently without Jobs' leadership style.
I see you point, but I think that Jobs not per se held Apple together. This is Tim Cook doing as well and arguably on a way larger scale.
The one thing that distinguished Jobs from the rest ever since is the fact, that he was Apple's greatest fan boy. If you have a look at the Itunes introduction, Jobs sits there and for around 2 hours showcases every feature and function. He was so into the product, that this keynote is for me the most nerdy ever conducted by him.
The others as well always show him being the company's No 1 fan and host of every feature there is.
Imagine to have a boss like this. He set the standard for product development in every regard.
And this is what slipped. Consistency is lacking and according to biographies about Cook, he has a very huge focus on him as a person. This is always wrong. It is about the product, nothing else.
There will never be a Jobs again. And it is getting worse from here: the old guard is mostly gone. Even the myth of Steve Jobs is nothing Gen Z cares about.
We live in the Post-Jobs phase and Cook seems to be overshadowing Jobs, as sad as this is. All innovations except the headphones date back to Jobs. All the scale that Apple reached to Cook.
I bet Jobs would rather have a way smaller scale with great products. This luxury lifestyle is nothing Jobs liked.
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.
The "Liquid Glass" button slowness on macOS is tolerable (coz I can really point at the center of a button with the mouse pointer) compared to the same problem on iOS 26. I have to literally tap several times on core system UI elements like navigation bar left and right buttons for the touches to register, this is Bad.
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
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
Calling linux niche is funny. Most used OS on the planet.
I guess you are only interested in the desktop looks part which on Linux is done by different window managers (like KDE, Gnome, Sway, ...) which can compete with MacOS in my view.
I was recently forced to switch from Gnome to MacOS Tahoe and the UX is so bad it's frustrating. Mission Control has no features apart from switching windows it seems (can not close windows, not change dock icons which all works on Gnome). Password fields often have no option to view the cleartext entered. This is especially confusing because symbols that I used daily are suddenly not printed on my keyboard anymore and I have to memorize shortcuts to enter them.
In finder I see no way to go to the parent folder, isn't that something people on macs do? It just feels like it's years behind open source alternatives...
Concerning your car story: have you tried other Operating systems? Otherwise your opinion might be worthless here...
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.
I know it's popular to shit on Windows (and often it's even justified), however DOS compatibility is long gone. It was still available in 32 bit Windows 10, but not in 64 bit versions.
I think it is more like the newest incarnation of sub-optimal user experience decisions. 20 years ago, their system was great for the time. However, nowadays it feels like a system that has been developed over time by different people with different concepts in mind.
Currently, MacOS has the worst window management compared to Windows and (all) the Linux desktop environments. I mean, where else do you have such problems with resizing windows or just switching between windows, not to mention the inconsistent feature sets when you want to work with virtual desktops...
> 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.
On the specific issue of window corner roundedness, Windows 11 is great IMO. The corners are rounded when the window is floating free, but change to square when it's maximized or snapped to a side of the screen. The perfect design.
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.
I think for a lot of us mac users we never get contact with another OS so it can seem like the world is ending. Reality is the Tahoe is terrible compared to older versions, but still incredible compared to others. IMHO as ever.
As a lifelong windows (upto 10) and linux user, no I did not find MacOS (using as the primary os since 7 months) incredible in any sense of word in comparison. Only thing I like is the mac hardware
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.
This would be fine too if there wasn't a legion of unhinged "designers" in position of power throughout the entire industry that mimic every bad decision apple makes.
Apple design is only different on release, after a few months I start getting force fed apple-isms in programs that don't have anything to do with them.
The border radius would be less jarring if the UI was actually designed for it. But it just cuts off elements like the scrollbar, which looks quite janky.
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.
It took decades before Apple finally let windows be resized from any side. For so many years the bottom right corner was the only way to resize a window. Their window system has always been crap.
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.
My colleague update his Mac a while back and I commented on the wild difference in corners between finder and word from across the room. I had to walk round and physically point at them for him to know what I was on about, and then he says "oh yeah, guess they are a bit different"
To my designers eye it was the first thing I saw, to him it was nothing.
I still think it's bad and a sign of a change in apple focus/style, but it's clearly not an issue at all for a lot of people.
Said colleague did get cross when he struggled to resize a window though. Turns out inconsistent corners means inconsistent handles. And that is a real problem.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades
I've been hearing this complaint for decades and I'll never understand it. The suggestion seems completely at odds with my own experience. Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.
I remember a time when I could visually see the screen repaint after minimizing a window, or waiting 3 minutes for the OS to boot, or waiting 30 minutes to install a 600mb video game from local media. My m2 air with 16gb of memory only has to reboot for updates, I haphazardly open 100 browser tabs, run spotify, slack, an IDE, build whatever project I'm working on, and the machine occasionally gets warm. Everything works fine, I never have performance issues. My linux machines, gaming pc, and phone feel just as snappy. It feels to me that we are living in a golden age of computer performance.
I think the best example is in iOS. On old iOS versions, the keyboard responsiveness took precedence over everything, no matter what. If you touched the keyboard, it would respond with an animation indicating what you are doing. The app itself may be frozen, but the self contained keyboard process would continue on, letting you know the app you are using is a buggy mess.
Now in iOS 26, you can just be typing in Notes or just the safari address bar for example, and the keyboard will randomly lag behind and freeze, likely because it is waiting on some autocomplete task to run on the keyboard process itself. And this is on top of the line, modern hardware.
A lot of the fundamentals that were focused on in the past to ensure responsiveness to user input was never lost, became lost. And lost for no real good reason, other than lazy development practices, unnecessary abstraction layers, and other modern developer conveniences.
Yeah long ago when I was doing some iOS development, I can remember Apple UX responsives mantras like “don’t block the main thread”, as it’s the thing responsible for making app UIs snappy even when something is happening.
Nowadays seems like half of Apple’s own software blocks on their main thread, like you said things like keyboard lock up for no reason. God forbid you try to paste too much text into a Note - the paste will crawl to a halt. Or, on my M4 max MacBook, 128GB ram, 8tb ssd, Photos library all originals saved locally - I try to cmd-R to rotate an image - the rotation of a fully local image can sometimes take >10 seconds while showing a blocking UI “Rotating Image…”, it’s insane how low the bar has dropped for Apple software.
My M4 Max 128GB ... 90% of the time is like you say.
10% of the time, Windowserver takes off and spends 150% CPU. Or I develop keystroke lag. Or I can't get a terminal open because Time Machine has the backup volume in the half mounted state.
It's thousands of times faster than the Ultra 1 that was once on my desk. And I can certainly do workloads that fundamentally take thousands of times more cycles. But I usually spend a greater proportion of this machine's speed on the UI and responsiveness doesn't always win over 30 years ago.
>Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.
One analogy is that the distance between two places in the world hasn't changed, but we're not arriving significantly faster than we before modern jetliners were invented. There was a period of new technology followed by rapid incremental progress toward shortened travel times until it leveled off.
However, the number of people able to consistently travel between more places in the world has continued to increase. New airports open regularly, and airliners have been optimized to fit more people, at the cost of passenger comfort.
Similarly, computers, operating systems, and their software aren't aligned in optimizing for user experience. Until a certain point, user interactions on MacOS took highest priority, which is why a single or dual core Mac felt more responsive than today, despite the capabilities and total work capacity of new Macs being orders of magnitude higher.
So we're not really even asking for the equivalent of faster jet planes, here, just wistfully remembering when we didn't need to arrive hours early to wait in lines and have to undress to get through security. Eventually all of us who remember the old era will be gone, and the next people will yearn for something that has changed from the experiences they shared.
Ok. Today we have multi-Ghz processors, with multiple cores at that.
Photons travel about 1 foot per nanosecond ... so the CPU can executes MANY instructions between the time photons leave your screen, and the time they reach your eyes.
Now, on Windows start Word (on a Mac start Writer) ... come on ... I'll wait.
Still with me? Don't blame the SSD and reload it again from the cache.
Not sure where you're getting at. MS Word, full load to ready state after macOS reboot takes ~ 2 seconds on my M1 mac. If I close and re-open it (so it's on fs cache) is takes about ~1 second.
Base model M4 Mac Mini -- takes 2 seconds to load Word (and ready to type) without it being cached. Less than 1 second if I quit it completely, and launch again, which I assume is because it's cached in RAM.
> Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.
This very much depends on what hardware you have and what you're doing on it (how much spare capacity you have).
Back in university I had a Techbite Zin 2, it had a Celeron N3350 and 4 GB of LPDDR4. It was affordable for me as a student (while I also had a PC in the dorm) and the keyboard was great and it worked out nicely for note taking and some web browsing when visiting parents in the countryside.
At the same time, the OS made a world of difference and it was anything but fast. Windows was pretty much unusable and it was the kind of hardware where you started to think whether you really need XFCE or whether LXDE would be enough.
I think both of the statements can be true: that Wirth's law is true and computers run way, way slower than they should due to bad software... and that normally you don't really feel it due to us throwing a lot of hardware at the problem to make us able to ignore it.
It's largely the same as you get with modern video game graphics and engines like UE5, where only now we are seeing horrible performance across the board that mainstream hardware often can't make up for and so devs reach for upscaling and framegen as something they demand you use (e.g. Borderlands 4), instead of just something to use for mobile gaming.
It's also like running ESLint and Prettier on your project and having a full build and formatting iteration take like 2 minutes without cache (though faster with cache), HOWEVER then you install Oxlint and Oxfmt and are surprised to find out that it takes SECONDS for the whole codebase. Maybe the "rewrite it in Rust" folks had a point. Bad code in Rust and similar languages will still run badly, but a fast runtime will make good code fly.
I could also probably compare the old Skype against modern Teams, or probably any split between the pre-Electron and modern day world.
Note: runtime in the loose sense, e.g. compiled native executables, vs the kind that also have GC, vs something like JVM and .NET, vs other interpreters like Python and Ruby and so on. Idk what you'd call it more precisely, execution model?
> Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.
The modern throughput is faster by far. However, what some people mean when they talk about "slower" is the latency snappiness that characterizes early microcomputer systems. That has definitely gotten way worse in an empirically measurable fashion.
Dan Luu's article explains this very well [1].
It is difficult today to go through that lived experience of that low latency today because you don't appreciate it until you lived it for years. Few people have access to an Apple ][ rig with a composite monitor for years on end any longer. The hackers that experienced that low latency never forgot it, because the responsiveness feels like a fluid extension of your thoughts in a way higher latency systems cannot match.
I wonder if this ties into why I'm baffled at the increasing trend of adding fake delays (f/ex "view transitions"). It's maddening to me. It's generally not a masking/performance delay either; I've recompiled a number of android apps for example to remove these sorts of things, and some actions that took an entire second to complete previously happen instantly after modification.
Ohhhh trust me, I have, assuming you mean "Disable animations". The three duration scale developer settings too. Thank you for suggesting it, though, just in case.
Some apps do respect it, but sometimes it's hardcoded, and OS settings don't seem to override it. Even the OS doesn't respect it in some cases, but I think it used to. Flutter apps? Forget about it.
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 cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples.
Why? No one has shown that LLMs produce particularly good code. You can get a lot of useful shit done with what is still slop, but there is no reason to believe there's any evolutionary improvement.
I don't know much about CPU internals, but this sounds like bullshit to me. A NOP is still an instruction that uses a cycle - why should that cool the CPU down? The CPU frequency should get reduced to lower the power consumption and hence the temperature.
Not all cycles cost the same amount of power. (Not that you would want to spam nops for thermal management, you should idle the core with a pause etc that actually tells the processor what you are trying to do.)
It used to be the case with intel macs and their atrocious confluence of cooling system, thermals, and power supply system (the CPU actually was not really to blame).
But when RAPL and similar tools to throttle CPU are used, the CPU time gets reported as kernel_task - on linux it would show similarly as one of the kernel threads.
People obsess about SIP but just remember that SIP does nothing to prevent the most common type of malware (ransomware).
If you use SIP and use package managers (npm, cargo, pip, etc) outside of a VM you are substantially more vulnerable to attack than someone who doesn't use SIP and doesn't use package managers.
So if you want to fix your corners, you can do it guilt-free by adopting some better security practices around the malware delivery systems / package managers that you have installed on your computer.
SIP protects the OS, not you nor your files. If you run third party software that can run `rm` of course you're vulnerable to data loss. Apples and oranges.
SIP guarantees that you will be able to turn on your computer in safe mode and remove the malware, whereas without it your OS is toast.
Yes but it's the files that are the important part.
If I had malware then the fate of the hardware is at the bottom of my priority list, I'm probably going to be replacing it anyway. I'd be more concerned that someone is going to steal my AWS credentials to run a cryptominer and I get a bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars!
The only solution to malware is to not install it in the first place. By the time SIP is useful you are already very screwed. SIP makes you safer in the same way that having a parachute on a plane makes you safer, technically yes but the difference in safety is marginal.
Sure, if you run software from strangers on the internet, while explicitly giving them access to your systems, bad things can happen. But SIP is definitely a net good that makes many things directly impossible.
Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing this?
> Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing this?
Sure, macOS could adopt an iPad-style security system that refuses to run all software outside the App Store. It works on iPhone and iPad just fine, all the prosumers love it.
It's not like native darwin triples are a popular compilation target. There wouldn't be any vast tragedy if the macOS shellutil authors were told to use zsh in a VM instead, it would separate the parts of macOS that Apple cares about from the parts they don't seriously support. WSL and Crostini achieves this on vastly weaker hardware with great results.
macOS does precisely that out of the box, doesn't it? You have to change some settings to run other software. I've got it set to: allow notarized, warn for internet downloads (even if notarized), everything else after explicit permission.
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.
I see in this story organisational boundaries between teams. Teams which don't have common coordination space (or used for something more __important__). Responsible people don't care enough to mitigate such deviations earlier
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".
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.
MacOS has a built in 4x4 window tiling which works for this purpose for me. I don’t find ever wanting more than 4 windows open on an ultrawide. Definitely not as powerful as something like xmonad but useful for the majority of my use cases.
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.
Option-clicking the green button maximizes it similarly to Windows, rather than going fullscreen. I never used fullscreen just because of the slow animation it used, and now it makes even less sense on my new MacBook with the notch. It basically replaces the menu bar with a blank bar.
I will wait for you to discover these Keyboard Shortcuts - Press the `fn + ^` (that globe key + control) and then try `c`, `f`, and all of the four arrow keys.
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
You can hold the 'option' key while dragging a window in order to set it in mosaic mode (you may need to activate the mode in Settings > Finder and Dock > Windows)
This was added as built-in functionality in Sequoia, not Tahoe. Personally I still use Magnet, which has worked well for over a decade and has a few more options.
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.
I'm surprised to hear that niri didn't work for you, I feel like it's a really good middle ground between tiling and floating window managers. It handles a lot of window resizing and arranging for me, without being too rigid. Windows can have any width they need without having to evenly divide my monitor.
In sway, put the lower priority windows in another workspace, or the scratchpad, or in tabs/stacks. You can bind keys to focus specific programs by their appid/class also, so even if they're on another workspace or monitor it'll jump right there.
It sounds like the scratchpad may be especially close to what you want.
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.
Note that fullscreen breaks command tab. Create two safari windows (or FF, Chrome, doesn't matter - except that Apple shipped safari, so we'd expect that to be able to render a window to the screen correctly).
Full screen one. Switch to the other. Now, use just cmd-tab and cmd-` to get to the full screen safari window (cmd-` switches between windows in the same application, which is literally never the right thing, but I digress).
For what it's worth, the third party tool 'altTab' mostly fixes this.
Bonus MacOS UI bug: I had to exit altTab to confirm they still hadn't fixed cmd-`. When I re-opened it using cmd-space, finder defaulted to the version in ~/Downloads instead of /Applications, then read me the riot act about untrusted software trying to change accessibility settings.
One more thing: I'm still not using MacOS 26, so all my complaints are about the "last known good" release.
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.
I don't understand how we keep hearing so often here about Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail, while every practical productivity advice involves some undiscoverable trick, or combinations of tricks, that seems so arbitrary and obtuse. I don't like Mac, in large parts because of that. No amount of marketing and peer pressure will convince me of the superior elegance and sophistication of something that hates you for wanting windows maximised. Those hidden tricks only add insult to injury as pervasive reminders of your presumed inadequacy, that you need to suffer to have things your way, and that Apple is magnanimous to even let you have them.
Every system has its issues. It's really a question of which issues you can live with and which system ultimately fits your workflow best.
After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back. Even on Windows I find myself working the way I do on macOS. Full screening every app made more sense on a 1024x768 screen (or smaller). Once I moved to a widescreen display (which happened to coincide with getting my first mac) running full screen felt like the wrong move most of time.
> After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back.
Sorry if this comes across as disrespectful, but it smells like Stockholm Syndrome. You are choosing not to use the full extent of your screen estate, and that is your fine choice, but that is no excuse for making it hard. If you compound the whitespace, the thick borders and the generally oversized UI controls, not much of "productive space" remains available to get the work done. I am not interested in macOS as a content-consumption-first vehicle, though that's clearly where Apple is steering.
It is situational but I think on a modern wide screen(or screens) if it is a single text-like document(like a web page or a terminal) you want 2 or perhaps 3 side by side. if the app implements it's own window management(like blender) a single full screen is best. Overlapping windows are important to have, but almost never desirable, it usually happens because you ran out of room.
The problem I have with this is that I was using a 1600x1200 21" display in 2000, and got used to workflows for it back then.
I am currently running a 16" display at a similar fractional scaled resolution (because Apple stopped understanding DPI after shipping the first LaserWriter, apparently).
Over that time, my eyes have not gotten better to match display DPI, so I'd rather have web sites just adjust the font size so that there are a reasonable number of words per line instead of rendering whitespace.
Non-full-screen windows would make more sense if Apple supported tiling properly, like most Linux WMs and also modern Windows.
MacOS sort of supports tiling in a "program manager shipped it + got promoted" sort of way, but you have to hover over the window manager buttons, which is slower than just manually arranging stuff. If there are any keyboard shortcuts to invoke tiling, or a way to change the WM buttons to not suck, I have not found them.
1600x1200 is still a 4:3 aspect ratio, I think I agree that scaling that makes sense. Full screen really got problematic with 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios. That's when the empty gutters in most apps, and especially websites, became really pronounced.
As for tiling in macOS...
You can use the mouse to drag windows into tiled positions. Grab a window and when your cursor hits the side, corner, or top edge of the screen, it will indicate the tiling position, much like AeroSnap on Windows from some years back. You can also hold the Option key while holding the window to get the tiling regions to show up without moving all the way to the edge.
Keyboard shortcuts exist as well. Go to Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts... In the dialog that opens, go to Windows. There you can see all the options and customize them if you'd like. Or set shortcuts for things that might not have one yet.
If for some reason dragging the windows around doesn't work, go to Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> the Windows heading. There are toggles to enable or disable dragging to tile, and the Option key trick. You can also turn off the margins on tiled Windows, which you'd probably want to do.
I've never been a big fan of window tiling myself. There was a time when I needed a lot of different windows visible at all times, but that hasn't been the case in a long time. I find tiling makes things too big or small, it's never what I actually want. I drag the window up to the top of the screen to invoke Fill from time to time, but that's about it.
Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail
That was the Mac in the 1990s. It was designed for, and highly usable with, a one-button mouse. It didn't have hidden context menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. Everything was visible in the menu bar and discoverable. The Finder was spatially aware with a high degree of persistence that allowed you to develop muscle memory for where icons would appear onscreen every time you opened a folder.
There was almost nothing hidden or lurking in the background, unlike today (my modern Mac system has 500 running processes right now, despite having only 15 applications open). We've had decades of feature creep since the classic Mac OS, which has made modern Macs extremely hard to use (relatively speaking).
It's been more than 10+ years that I've been able to Option+Click the green button to fill the screen. Works for any app, and always has, unless that app explicitly disallows resizing. That's not recent.
Why is it that some of the most useful features in Apple products are impossible to find on your own? I recently also learned about "three finger swipe to undo" in iOS instead of shaking the damn thing like it owes me money.
rectangle [1] is pretty much essential for me because of this. I use only a few keypresses (maximize window, move to one of the halves of the screen horizontally) but that is enough. My mouse very rately interacts with the borders of any window, or those buttons. I had to click on the green one that you mentioned in order to see what it did (yuck).
I use a third party tool with shortcut keys that cycle between: full height, left half of screen; full height, right half of screen; full height, full width.
It works well for me, makes it easy to get two things side by side without wasting space.
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.
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).
The spatial Finder was something different: having each folder open a new window, and that particular folder's window always re-opening in the same position on screen, with the same window size and same layout of files inside. Having the position of each folder remain consistent and persistent allows you to remember a file's spatial location much as you would for a printed document on a physical desk (exactly where you left it), rather than having to recall its path in the file system hierarchy.
Obviously all of that works better if Finder windows don't usually fill the screen, but it's not a hard requirement.
With the classic OS, all the windows were supposed to work this way. And it seems most apps still do remember their window positions, making it easy to find them. (Expose even keeps the positions consistent when you 'zoom-out'.) Which is why Mac users tend to position their windows rather than relying on alt-tab or the dock or another app-switcher.
(IMO the spacial Finder was designed around floppies and small folders and didn't work so well with hierarchical folder views, so no big loss...)
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.
> The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.
It sounds to me you've never actually looked at a monitor display large swaths of white before, it's brighter than light hitting a wall for sure, even with the brightness down, extra so when the ambient lightning is dark too.
I've definitely seen large monitors that are unpleasantly bright in the dark, but I've also seen an overly bright projector that was similarly unpleasant. I genuinely don't understand why changing the backlight wouldn't fix everything. A projector's image isn't diffuse like a lightbulb, if it was you wouldn't see an image.
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.
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.
Maybe this explains some of the bizarre questions I've gotten from mac designers.
The other day I was explaining to one that their designs fixed width looks silly once it got up towards 4k resolutions. But the designers main concern was if people actually used full screen browsers on 4k monitors and if there was any point in thinking about the design at that resolution.
There are plenty of times I enjoy have 2 browsers side by side of even 4 browsers in a square, and being able to do that is one of the benefits of having a 4k monitor. But without a doubt the majority of my time is spent with a full size browser window open, and I observe the same from all the other windows/linux users I manage that use a 4k monitor.
In service of keeping this post simple, I've ignore system display/ui scaling. But still... the question/assumption from the mac designer completely blew my mind.
And actually typing that all out just unlocked a bunch of memories about how many times I've been:
1. On a screen share support call with a mac user
2. Asked them to pull up a webpage
3. They pull up a super tiny ass browser window to the point I can't really see anything
4. I ask them to full screen the browser so we can actually read shit
5. The mac user just straight up panics or acts like like I've spoken an alien language to them.
The same process happens when I need a mac user to get to an apps settings that on a windows/linux computer would normally be under something like File > Preferences/Settings. They have no idea what I'm talking about or know just barely enough to know they don't remember how to do it and panic.
Then I have to go google it and remember that CMD+comma(⌘+,) exists and reveal it to the mac user like it's actual black magic. And then I immediately forget about it until 6 months later when I need to support a mac user again and I repeat the whole cycle again.
> 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.
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.
This has always been quintessential Mac for me. First thing I noticed people do on macs much more than PCs was not expanding the windows. Windows are always just floating around. There's no equivalent to the maximize button, it's funny but I don't even know anymore what that "maximize" button on macs does but I remember it's not what I would expect.
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.
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).
I know lots of people on laptop screens who don't maximize windows. It seems weird to me to only use like 80% of the screen's real estate, but sure, whatever.
On large external monitors, I think it makes total sense not to have every window maximized, though. Probably less usable that way.
I almost never use full screen windows on a Mac. Things like video are full screen, but that's a swipe to another workspace. Half-screen windows on a 27" screen are already bigger than a sheet of letter paper. Lots happens in terminal windows, which vary a bit, but are usually around 100x60, and maybe 1/6 of the screen.
I do have Rectangle installed, so apps generally get at most the left or right half of the screen, with a shortcut for badly behaved websites that need 2/3 to look right. Apps are usually pretty good about remembering window positions, so mostly you futz with it once and you're done.
Actually yes, I have all windows overlapping and none expanded to fill the screen, unless I'm really doing something very specific that needs as much space as possible. But the rounded edges are still slightly annoying.
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, 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.
“Maximising” windows full screen, apart from the genuinely-full-screen-takeover mode you can put windows in (where they take a virtual desktop slot too) has never been an idiomatic part of the Macintosh UI, since the beginning. The “zoom” button traditionally meant “toggle between a user defined window size, and a size that is just big enough to avoid scroll bars appearing, where possible”. It goes back to the spatial desktop metaphor.
Personally I try and work with that as much as possible, though it’s not always ideal.
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 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 never understood running apps in full screen. Unless it's an IDE, Video Editor, or some other app with tools filling all nooks and crannies, I want windows that fit the content. I don't want to launch a text or document editor in full screen, read a PDF in full screen. Typically I don't even want to watch a video full screen. I also generally don't want tiling. I want to arrange windows with parts peeking out behind other windows to reference while I'm working on something else. I want some sense of "space" related to where I left a window.
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.
I use several non-fullscreen windows over desktop. Stage manager makes switching between them very convenient. But I do use full screen windows, they live in their separate spaces. I see no reason whatsoever to maximise any window without it going full screen mode
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 almost never expand an application to be full-screen, even on my laptop. This despite the fact that I'll resize an application's window to fill the whole screen except for the dock. I think that's why I don't maximize it: I want the dock to remain accessible.
A lot of stupid things about Mac window management stems from the mistake of forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen. This essentially turns your entire desktop into ONE application's window, within which its actual windows float around.
Historically this led to the Mac's penchant for apps that spawned an irritating flotilla of windows that you had to herd around your screen. Not only did this deny users a way to minimize the whole app at once, but it also sucked because you could see everything on your desktop (or other apps' UIs) THROUGH the UI of the application you were trying to use. A dysfunctional mess.
Around 15 years ago, I estimate, the huge advantage of a single application window finally permeated the Apple mindset and things have gotten much better in that regard. But Apple should have abandoned the single menu in the transition to OS X, and put menus where they belong: on applications' main frames. That would make the desktop a truly unlimited workspace and eliminate the daily irritation of the menu changes its contents behind the user's back because he clicked on another application's window (perhaps to move it).
Multiple times a day I minimize an application and then attempt to do something in the application that's now filling the screen... only to find that the menu still belongs to the application that isn't even shown. It's just so dumb.
But then... this is the GUI that, for decades, would only let you resize windows from ONE corner and NO edges. Apple grudgingly, half-assedly, and unreliably addressed that in the 2000s, only now to make it even less reliable in the shambolic Tahoe UI.
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)
> 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
Strange, I constantly get annoyed by how slow and unresponsive the Mac's tiling is when dragging windows to the edge. At the top it has at least half a second delay for no reason. But at least the newest version now has caught up with Windows 7.
I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE fullscreen would be too big.
But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.
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
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.
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.
I’ve been using Macs for development for 20 years, and even on a small laptop screen I don’t expand windows to fill the screen. So I guess, yes, there are a few weirdos out there at least?
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.
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 use a mix of Cmd-Tab and a hot key to see all non-minimized apps (Mission Control?) to pick from. I’ve realized that that I’m faster at seeing the color of the window I’m looking for than remembering the app name.
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 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.
A lot of it is just old Mac UI dogma. On a multi-monitor or ultrawide desk the default behavior still acts like everyone wants a few polite little windows drifting in the middle, so browsers, IDEs, and other dense apps start half-crippled until you drag everything into place by hand. Apple seems weirdly attached to the idea that the desktop should feel like an oversized tablet, and it's anoying.
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 don't maximize windows because it means a 1 second delay, as for some reason Mac OS still does the hardcoded workspace switching animation even for that. Which means entering/leaving fullscreen in a video player is also delayed every time. I don't get it, not even the accessibility settings can disable this waste of time.
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?
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.
> full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space
Any space not used for the task I'm focused on is wasted. For me the actual problem is that switching apps/windows is too slow because of UI animations.
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’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…
Mac OS has become what would happen if Harley Davidson merged with Volvo Truck and some high up said that to "reduce costs" and "homogenize the brand", the design groups needed to be merged and put forward a unified design. If I was less lazy, I'd have a !AI thing whip me up a mashup drawing.
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.
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?
Oh that's just how it is on Windows though. Seems like on mac the minimize button provides a buffer between maximize and close. I'd rather accidentally minimize if I'm trying to maximize than close the window
I keep jearing this but after years of using MacOS Is still hate the windowing behavior. There is already a way for windowless apps to run - its in the top right corner of my menu bar. Why not use this if you _really_ need windowless apps to run in the background? Also dont get me started on window switching...
It makes absolutely no sense to have a windowless app. Why would anyone run photoshop without a window?
There are apps that they need to run in the background, sure. They have a spot in the menubar.
Oh no I forgot, you can only have 5 of them. Not 6. Why? Because FU. Go buy a third party app (bartender) that records your entire screen to do basic app management that the OS should do.
Change without further qualifier implies doing something equivalent or better by different means or with a different look. What people are observing is a specific kind of change: regression, where the experience of appearance or result of action are worsened or no longer an option at all. It's a trend I've noticed in Apple since the move to unibody.
Not a mac user here - why can't you use the same method to set the corner radius to 0.1 or something and effectively turn of the roundness, but without root?
>The reason why you need to disable SIP, is that to edit the dynamic libraries that system apps like Safari (which has crazy bad corners) use, you need to edit system libraries that exist the root.
When Adobe suite was de facto standard for designing and coding interfaces (you know, Flash) their own software was so immensely bad that there was enough material for a guy to make fun of them on a daily basis for a good couple of years.
I tried something similar while building my tool site — biggest issue was SEO indexing. Fixed it by improving internal linking instead of relying on sitemap.
I have never been happier to be a long time Linux user. Our systems are working significantly better than ever before and I have personally converted more people to Linux in the last year than the 15 years before that.
Particularly KDE. They have had some ups and downs but finally they have built a great foundation with Plasma and Plasma dark mode with Breeze is such a great balance of flexibility and fairly consistent look and feel. I stuck around with Gnome for too long in the name of simplicity but once you appreciate that Plasma gets out of your way once things are exactly how you want it, I have come to appreciate not having to install extensions for everyday "normal" things a lot more.
they tried to do something with remembering "how you left things" between sessions, and even when disabled things are still weird...
Also some power management related hooks are not working as well as before. Like if you put the computer to sleep at night, and wake it up in the morning, the automatic dark-to-light theme switch doesn't trigger. at least not always.
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.
These inconsistent corner radii are actually intentional, FWIW - the radius depends on the window’s function (main, utility, etc.). I don’t think it looks great, but there’s no lack of attention to detail.
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.
You have a truly Magic Mouse if yours charges in 15 minutes. In my experience, it is hours to charge from zero, which until I put an always-running monitor in the menu bar for the mouse battery level is what you are guaranteed to have since there is no other indicator of mouse battery level.
I used to roll my eyes at the complaints until I actually had one of these, and it is appallingly bad engineering. Especially since the previous design, which was functionally identical just needed a 10 second battery swap.
great catch on the corner inconsistency. hadnt noticed until reading this now i cant unsee it.
this is actually one of the reasons i ended up going all in on a tiling wm (aerospace). once youre tiling, windows are edge to edge so the corner radius thing mostly disappears. the trade off is giving up floating windows,
the DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES approach is clever though. making everything consistently rounded is way more pragmatic than fighting apples design decisions or disabling SIP.
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.
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.
This was one of the first things I noticed after upgrade and was confused. I had an understanding that people in Apple UX are extremely meticulous when it comes to every single little tiny detail. I guess those times are over.
They still obsess about it but they seem to be idiots, and always have been. Nobody has ever been able to explain reasonably why "about this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every MacOS program - it isn't useful exept maybe once a year. It's a ridiculous UX choice, always has been. Don't get me started on Finder.
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.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were a team, and Jobs would regularly tell people their work was "shit" if it didn't make sense.
Apple traditionally burned out its talent, and is no longer structured to follow Jobs original vision. There is a lot of goodwill with the users, but just like Sony/HP/IBM/Microsoft/Sun it can't last forever. The process-people entrench themselves, and ruin everything... just as Jobs predicted. =3
At some point in time, Apple used nice software to be able to sell expensive but mediocre hardware.
Now they sell expensive but nice hardware and they have mediocre software.
It seems you can only choose one out of three, nice hardware, nice software, good price. Apple is always choosing high price, and they either gave customers nice hardware or nice software, but not both.
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...)
> 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/
I feel like the only dude on the planet who uses fullscreen workspaces on Mac.
The number of times I have noticed the corner of my windows is precisely zero because each important application gets its own workspace, so the window frame doesn't get rendered. Sometimes I'll tile two windows side by side on my external monitor but even then this is a complete non issue for me.
Are you guys just running everything on the one desktop workspace in windowed mode? That seems like madness.
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.
For all his infamy, Jobs held Apple together in large part through his uncompromising perfectionism and attention to the kind of details that have since been demoted to "we'll fix it in the next version" or the equivalent of "# temporary". Every company is a bit of an ant-farm, but this one either has no single queen to lay down the law, or the queen is "trying things out" :P
Jobs used to laugh at Microsoft for all manner of inconsistencies in behaviour and user experience with Windows, but now Apple is contending with the same problem, in part due to exposure as macOS has never been so popular and prevalent, and now there are ever growing amount of eyes calling them out for those inconsistencies that have been appearing more and more frequently without Jobs' leadership style.
I see you point, but I think that Jobs not per se held Apple together. This is Tim Cook doing as well and arguably on a way larger scale.
The one thing that distinguished Jobs from the rest ever since is the fact, that he was Apple's greatest fan boy. If you have a look at the Itunes introduction, Jobs sits there and for around 2 hours showcases every feature and function. He was so into the product, that this keynote is for me the most nerdy ever conducted by him.
The others as well always show him being the company's No 1 fan and host of every feature there is.
Imagine to have a boss like this. He set the standard for product development in every regard.
And this is what slipped. Consistency is lacking and according to biographies about Cook, he has a very huge focus on him as a person. This is always wrong. It is about the product, nothing else.
There will never be a Jobs again. And it is getting worse from here: the old guard is mostly gone. Even the myth of Steve Jobs is nothing Gen Z cares about.
We live in the Post-Jobs phase and Cook seems to be overshadowing Jobs, as sad as this is. All innovations except the headphones date back to Jobs. All the scale that Apple reached to Cook.
I bet Jobs would rather have a way smaller scale with great products. This luxury lifestyle is nothing Jobs liked.
Sad, but true.
this is why I want Jobs back, not as CEO but as head of software or head of software QA
One wonders what Jobs would think of Liquid Glass.
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 think these buttons weren't too responsive for about three major MacOS versions
The "Liquid Glass" button slowness on macOS is tolerable (coz I can really point at the center of a button with the mouse pointer) compared to the same problem on iOS 26. I have to literally tap several times on core system UI elements like navigation bar left and right buttons for the touches to register, this is Bad.
Agreed, I've blocked all notifications for years. Maybe it got worse recently, but I thought they were annoying since at least Big Sur.
Also went from one click to two clicks
The notification buttons have always felt a little squishy and unresponsive since they were added. They’re terrible.
I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects rather well on macos.
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.
I disagree as it shows a fundamental flaw in terms of separation of concerns that's probably manifest throughout the operating system.
Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we know the whole thing is a hack.
Hmm, that's a good point actually! Hadn't considered that!
It’s like the famous artist putting a clause in a contract that they wanted bowls of M&Ms with the blue ones removed.
Not because they necessarily cared, but because it functions as an easy-to-verify proxy for whether the venue actually read the contract.
The artist was the band Van Halen; the forbidden color was brown
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/
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
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.
> compared to Windows
I never said that
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
Calling linux niche is funny. Most used OS on the planet.
I guess you are only interested in the desktop looks part which on Linux is done by different window managers (like KDE, Gnome, Sway, ...) which can compete with MacOS in my view.
I was recently forced to switch from Gnome to MacOS Tahoe and the UX is so bad it's frustrating. Mission Control has no features apart from switching windows it seems (can not close windows, not change dock icons which all works on Gnome). Password fields often have no option to view the cleartext entered. This is especially confusing because symbols that I used daily are suddenly not printed on my keyboard anymore and I have to memorize shortcuts to enter them. In finder I see no way to go to the parent folder, isn't that something people on macs do? It just feels like it's years behind open source alternatives...
Concerning your car story: have you tried other Operating systems? Otherwise your opinion might be worthless here...
When a computer doesn't boot you don't need to compare it to another to see that it's broken. Some things are just obvious without comparison.
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.
Apple didn't have this issue 1 year ago :-)
I know it's popular to shit on Windows (and often it's even justified), however DOS compatibility is long gone. It was still available in 32 bit Windows 10, but not in 64 bit versions.
I think it is more like the newest incarnation of sub-optimal user experience decisions. 20 years ago, their system was great for the time. However, nowadays it feels like a system that has been developed over time by different people with different concepts in mind.
Currently, MacOS has the worst window management compared to Windows and (all) the Linux desktop environments. I mean, where else do you have such problems with resizing windows or just switching between windows, not to mention the inconsistent feature sets when you want to work with virtual desktops...
It's not the biggest flaw, there are plenty others, but it does seem to be universally disliked.
For example, there is not much you could do to Finder to make it worse.
Finder used to suck. I mean, it still sucks, but it used to suck too.
> 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.
I think people are more complaining about windows crashing on updates or Microsoft putting ads everywhere or forcing one drive
That’s way more than just the “position of the start menu”
For Windows, you also have an ad, an AI, or both appearing in every other app.
On the specific issue of window corner roundedness, Windows 11 is great IMO. The corners are rounded when the window is floating free, but change to square when it's maximized or snapped to a side of the screen. The perfect design.
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.
I think for a lot of us mac users we never get contact with another OS so it can seem like the world is ending. Reality is the Tahoe is terrible compared to older versions, but still incredible compared to others. IMHO as ever.
As a lifelong windows (upto 10) and linux user, no I did not find MacOS (using as the primary os since 7 months) incredible in any sense of word in comparison. Only thing I like is the mac hardware
The biggest flaw is that the system is opinionated, so you cannot change anything you dislike.
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.
Different for the sake of being different.
This would be fine too if there wasn't a legion of unhinged "designers" in position of power throughout the entire industry that mimic every bad decision apple makes.
Apple design is only different on release, after a few months I start getting force fed apple-isms in programs that don't have anything to do with them.
Or at least consistent opinions
It seems it'd at least getting consistently bad opinions on it.
The border radius would be less jarring if the UI was actually designed for it. But it just cuts off elements like the scrollbar, which looks quite janky.
Yeah there's even first party applications like Logic Pro where the rounded corners cut off text.
Or maybe people focus on corners because it’s one of the few visible things they can actually complain about — the real issues are harder to pin down.
It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts
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.
It took decades before Apple finally let windows be resized from any side. For so many years the bottom right corner was the only way to resize a window. Their window system has always been crap.
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.
My colleague update his Mac a while back and I commented on the wild difference in corners between finder and word from across the room. I had to walk round and physically point at them for him to know what I was on about, and then he says "oh yeah, guess they are a bit different"
To my designers eye it was the first thing I saw, to him it was nothing.
I still think it's bad and a sign of a change in apple focus/style, but it's clearly not an issue at all for a lot of people.
Said colleague did get cross when he struggled to resize a window though. Turns out inconsistent corners means inconsistent handles. And that is a real problem.
It's not even close to the biggest flaw, it's just the most obvious one.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades
I've been hearing this complaint for decades and I'll never understand it. The suggestion seems completely at odds with my own experience. Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.
I remember a time when I could visually see the screen repaint after minimizing a window, or waiting 3 minutes for the OS to boot, or waiting 30 minutes to install a 600mb video game from local media. My m2 air with 16gb of memory only has to reboot for updates, I haphazardly open 100 browser tabs, run spotify, slack, an IDE, build whatever project I'm working on, and the machine occasionally gets warm. Everything works fine, I never have performance issues. My linux machines, gaming pc, and phone feel just as snappy. It feels to me that we are living in a golden age of computer performance.
I think the best example is in iOS. On old iOS versions, the keyboard responsiveness took precedence over everything, no matter what. If you touched the keyboard, it would respond with an animation indicating what you are doing. The app itself may be frozen, but the self contained keyboard process would continue on, letting you know the app you are using is a buggy mess.
Now in iOS 26, you can just be typing in Notes or just the safari address bar for example, and the keyboard will randomly lag behind and freeze, likely because it is waiting on some autocomplete task to run on the keyboard process itself. And this is on top of the line, modern hardware.
A lot of the fundamentals that were focused on in the past to ensure responsiveness to user input was never lost, became lost. And lost for no real good reason, other than lazy development practices, unnecessary abstraction layers, and other modern developer conveniences.
Yeah long ago when I was doing some iOS development, I can remember Apple UX responsives mantras like “don’t block the main thread”, as it’s the thing responsible for making app UIs snappy even when something is happening.
Nowadays seems like half of Apple’s own software blocks on their main thread, like you said things like keyboard lock up for no reason. God forbid you try to paste too much text into a Note - the paste will crawl to a halt. Or, on my M4 max MacBook, 128GB ram, 8tb ssd, Photos library all originals saved locally - I try to cmd-R to rotate an image - the rotation of a fully local image can sometimes take >10 seconds while showing a blocking UI “Rotating Image…”, it’s insane how low the bar has dropped for Apple software.
This trend was obvious when they started removing physical buttons. My thought was, man these people do put so much faith in software.
My M4 Max 128GB ... 90% of the time is like you say.
10% of the time, Windowserver takes off and spends 150% CPU. Or I develop keystroke lag. Or I can't get a terminal open because Time Machine has the backup volume in the half mounted state.
It's thousands of times faster than the Ultra 1 that was once on my desk. And I can certainly do workloads that fundamentally take thousands of times more cycles. But I usually spend a greater proportion of this machine's speed on the UI and responsiveness doesn't always win over 30 years ago.
Or contactsd lol
Spotlight doesn’t make sense either.. caches get evicted, but there’s no logic that prevents it from building it back up immediately
Log processes are fine, but they should never be able to use 100% / At the same priority (cpu+io)
>Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.
One analogy is that the distance between two places in the world hasn't changed, but we're not arriving significantly faster than we before modern jetliners were invented. There was a period of new technology followed by rapid incremental progress toward shortened travel times until it leveled off.
However, the number of people able to consistently travel between more places in the world has continued to increase. New airports open regularly, and airliners have been optimized to fit more people, at the cost of passenger comfort.
Similarly, computers, operating systems, and their software aren't aligned in optimizing for user experience. Until a certain point, user interactions on MacOS took highest priority, which is why a single or dual core Mac felt more responsive than today, despite the capabilities and total work capacity of new Macs being orders of magnitude higher.
So we're not really even asking for the equivalent of faster jet planes, here, just wistfully remembering when we didn't need to arrive hours early to wait in lines and have to undress to get through security. Eventually all of us who remember the old era will be gone, and the next people will yearn for something that has changed from the experiences they shared.
Ok. Today we have multi-Ghz processors, with multiple cores at that.
Photons travel about 1 foot per nanosecond ... so the CPU can executes MANY instructions between the time photons leave your screen, and the time they reach your eyes.
Now, on Windows start Word (on a Mac start Writer) ... come on ... I'll wait.
Still with me? Don't blame the SSD and reload it again from the cache.
Weep.
Not sure where you're getting at. MS Word, full load to ready state after macOS reboot takes ~ 2 seconds on my M1 mac. If I close and re-open it (so it's on fs cache) is takes about ~1 second.
You, and sibling comment author just never experienced the truly responsive ui.
It is one where reaction is under a single frame from action.
This was possible on 1980s hardware. I witnessed that, I used that. Why is it not possible now?
Base model M4 Mac Mini -- takes 2 seconds to load Word (and ready to type) without it being cached. Less than 1 second if I quit it completely, and launch again, which I assume is because it's cached in RAM.
> Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.
This very much depends on what hardware you have and what you're doing on it (how much spare capacity you have).
Back in university I had a Techbite Zin 2, it had a Celeron N3350 and 4 GB of LPDDR4. It was affordable for me as a student (while I also had a PC in the dorm) and the keyboard was great and it worked out nicely for note taking and some web browsing when visiting parents in the countryside.
At the same time, the OS made a world of difference and it was anything but fast. Windows was pretty much unusable and it was the kind of hardware where you started to think whether you really need XFCE or whether LXDE would be enough.
I think both of the statements can be true: that Wirth's law is true and computers run way, way slower than they should due to bad software... and that normally you don't really feel it due to us throwing a lot of hardware at the problem to make us able to ignore it.
It's largely the same as you get with modern video game graphics and engines like UE5, where only now we are seeing horrible performance across the board that mainstream hardware often can't make up for and so devs reach for upscaling and framegen as something they demand you use (e.g. Borderlands 4), instead of just something to use for mobile gaming.
It's also like running ESLint and Prettier on your project and having a full build and formatting iteration take like 2 minutes without cache (though faster with cache), HOWEVER then you install Oxlint and Oxfmt and are surprised to find out that it takes SECONDS for the whole codebase. Maybe the "rewrite it in Rust" folks had a point. Bad code in Rust and similar languages will still run badly, but a fast runtime will make good code fly.
I could also probably compare the old Skype against modern Teams, or probably any split between the pre-Electron and modern day world.
Note: runtime in the loose sense, e.g. compiled native executables, vs the kind that also have GC, vs something like JVM and .NET, vs other interpreters like Python and Ruby and so on. Idk what you'd call it more precisely, execution model?
> Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.
The modern throughput is faster by far. However, what some people mean when they talk about "slower" is the latency snappiness that characterizes early microcomputer systems. That has definitely gotten way worse in an empirically measurable fashion.
Dan Luu's article explains this very well [1].
It is difficult today to go through that lived experience of that low latency today because you don't appreciate it until you lived it for years. Few people have access to an Apple ][ rig with a composite monitor for years on end any longer. The hackers that experienced that low latency never forgot it, because the responsiveness feels like a fluid extension of your thoughts in a way higher latency systems cannot match.
[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/*
I wonder if this ties into why I'm baffled at the increasing trend of adding fake delays (f/ex "view transitions"). It's maddening to me. It's generally not a masking/performance delay either; I've recompiled a number of android apps for example to remove these sorts of things, and some actions that took an entire second to complete previously happen instantly after modification.
Have you tried disabling animations in the System Settings? Some apps respond to that.
Ohhhh trust me, I have, assuming you mean "Disable animations". The three duration scale developer settings too. Thank you for suggesting it, though, just in case.
Some apps do respect it, but sometimes it's hardcoded, and OS settings don't seem to override it. Even the OS doesn't respect it in some cases, but I think it used to. Flutter apps? Forget about it.
I think we're already seeing the operating systems that AI can build, and I don't think they've been an improvement.
The fact microsoft keeps messing up my Windows 11 gaming desktop, I think you're right.
Gaming is one more area where Linux has surpassed Windows. I'm using Valve's Proton to run Windows games on Linux and it's smooth as butter.
Yeah if I wasn't a Valorant addict (and competing in Contender, pushing for Invite if we win this season) I'd drop it for Linux entirely.
Yes, except for the odd anti-cheat that needs kernel level access
> Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade
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.
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.
And I could imagine SwiftUI only makes this worse, because it's quite easy to trigger tons of unnecessary redraws.
People don't really like apps that stutter.
And maybe that would get enough users to leave or complain that managers might allow some dev time to fix bad behavior.
Symptoms with no way to understand why.
If Apple would give insight about this, the developers wold get bug reports and complaints
Similar to the electron shit
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 think suggesting QubesOS to someone is coming from macOS is a really bad choice.
> I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples.
Why? No one has shown that LLMs produce particularly good code. You can get a lot of useful shit done with what is still slop, but there is no reason to believe there's any evolutionary improvement.
Kernel_task is often the os thermal throttling, when was the last time you hit the vents with a can of compressed air?
Nobody's been at the wheel for a while, it's just not a race car, it's a barge.
Yeah this is my actual issue with Tahoe. It blows my mind people keep bringing up the corners when WindowServer is complete trash now.
kernel_task using 100% is the system thermally throttling and the OS spamming NOPs to cool the CPU down
This is usually not the case.
I don't know much about CPU internals, but this sounds like bullshit to me. A NOP is still an instruction that uses a cycle - why should that cool the CPU down? The CPU frequency should get reduced to lower the power consumption and hence the temperature.
Not all cycles cost the same amount of power. (Not that you would want to spam nops for thermal management, you should idle the core with a pause etc that actually tells the processor what you are trying to do.)
It used to be the case with intel macs and their atrocious confluence of cooling system, thermals, and power supply system (the CPU actually was not really to blame).
But when RAPL and similar tools to throttle CPU are used, the CPU time gets reported as kernel_task - on linux it would show similarly as one of the kernel threads.
Any way to see that?
>I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples.
Even if that would be possible, you can't run commercial software. And for many people, the software they run is more important than the OS.
I'm very worried one day Apple will start enforcing upgrades to Tahoe just like Microsoft is doing with Windows.
Is this a case of "It Just Works" or "You're Holding It Wrong"?
People obsess about SIP but just remember that SIP does nothing to prevent the most common type of malware (ransomware).
If you use SIP and use package managers (npm, cargo, pip, etc) outside of a VM you are substantially more vulnerable to attack than someone who doesn't use SIP and doesn't use package managers.
So if you want to fix your corners, you can do it guilt-free by adopting some better security practices around the malware delivery systems / package managers that you have installed on your computer.
SIP protects the OS, not you nor your files. If you run third party software that can run `rm` of course you're vulnerable to data loss. Apples and oranges.
SIP guarantees that you will be able to turn on your computer in safe mode and remove the malware, whereas without it your OS is toast.
Yes but it's the files that are the important part.
If I had malware then the fate of the hardware is at the bottom of my priority list, I'm probably going to be replacing it anyway. I'd be more concerned that someone is going to steal my AWS credentials to run a cryptominer and I get a bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars!
The only solution to malware is to not install it in the first place. By the time SIP is useful you are already very screwed. SIP makes you safer in the same way that having a parachute on a plane makes you safer, technically yes but the difference in safety is marginal.
SIP also backs some security mechanisms to ensure that they remain functional and not easily bypassable.
Sure, if you run software from strangers on the internet, while explicitly giving them access to your systems, bad things can happen. But SIP is definitely a net good that makes many things directly impossible.
Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing this?
> Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing this?
Sure, macOS could adopt an iPad-style security system that refuses to run all software outside the App Store. It works on iPhone and iPad just fine, all the prosumers love it.
It's not like native darwin triples are a popular compilation target. There wouldn't be any vast tragedy if the macOS shellutil authors were told to use zsh in a VM instead, it would separate the parts of macOS that Apple cares about from the parts they don't seriously support. WSL and Crostini achieves this on vastly weaker hardware with great results.
macOS does precisely that out of the box, doesn't it? You have to change some settings to run other software. I've got it set to: allow notarized, warn for internet downloads (even if notarized), everything else after explicit permission.
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.
You're not alone, I was calling out how ugly Safari is in Tahoe a few weeks ago!
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.
I think it's a happy quirk of the blog's tagging system (#Programming is a category tag), but the ending feels quite profound:
> Now at least everything is consistently bad. #Programming
I see in this story organisational boundaries between teams. Teams which don't have common coordination space (or used for something more __important__). Responsible people don't care enough to mitigate such deviations earlier
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".
Never trust people who play mind tricks like this.
I wish I were less observant.
My neurodivergency makes me feel actual distress over those corners. I am not being dramatic. It sucks.
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.
As a 38" ultrawide owner myself, I use vscode or intellij maximized most of the day, depending on the codebase I'm
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
I split a vs code window and a browser or a browser and terminal window on my 13" mb air. Usually need additional context on the same screen.
MacOS has a built in 4x4 window tiling which works for this purpose for me. I don’t find ever wanting more than 4 windows open on an ultrawide. Definitely not as powerful as something like xmonad but useful for the majority of my use cases.
Windows also has this kind of tiling built-in. It even comes with default keyboard shortcuts.
So does Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/mchl9674d0b0/....
Obnoxiously, it's part of the recent trend of overloading the Globe/Fn key, so it's hard to do with third-party keyboards.
Can you not change the shortcut?
Here to say ubuntu's got it built in as well
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.
> 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.
> Hover over the green button in the top left of the window.
Weirdly it still doesn't quite do what I want. It leaves a gap around the edge of the window for some reason.
Option-clicking the green button maximizes it similarly to Windows, rather than going fullscreen. I never used fullscreen just because of the slow animation it used, and now it makes even less sense on my new MacBook with the notch. It basically replaces the menu bar with a blank bar.
Damn. Never knew that. TIL
I will wait for you to discover these Keyboard Shortcuts - Press the `fn + ^` (that globe key + control) and then try `c`, `f`, and all of the four arrow keys.
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 can't speak to the quarters but you absolutely can snap windows to the left and right halves in MacOS.
i do quarters all the time. it used to be with third party apps. iu think its native now
You can hold the 'option' key while dragging a window in order to set it in mosaic mode (you may need to activate the mode in Settings > Finder and Dock > Windows)
I'm pretty sure Tahoe added that behavior natively. I personally use Magnet on Sequoia, however, so I am not 100% certain.
This was added as built-in functionality in Sequoia, not Tahoe. Personally I still use Magnet, which has worked well for over a decade and has a few more options.
I constantly stretch windows to maximum height.
I maximize windows of graphics and video editors.
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.
Install i3wm, it will change your life.
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.
I'm surprised to hear that niri didn't work for you, I feel like it's a really good middle ground between tiling and floating window managers. It handles a lot of window resizing and arranging for me, without being too rigid. Windows can have any width they need without having to evenly divide my monitor.
In sway, put the lower priority windows in another workspace, or the scratchpad, or in tabs/stacks. You can bind keys to focus specific programs by their appid/class also, so even if they're on another workspace or monitor it'll jump right there.
It sounds like the scratchpad may be especially close to what you want.
Maybe awesome-wm would be better for you then.
I’m currently using Krohnkite [1] to get dynamic tiling in KDE, and Klassy [2] to get i3wm-like pixel borders instead of full window decorations.
[1]: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite [2]: https://github.com/paulmcauley/klassy
Ultrawide without a virtual screen manager is a missed opportunity. Maximize window is still very useful with virtual screen areas on large screens.
Brother, I have 42 inch 16:9 and I always maximize everything.
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.
Note that fullscreen breaks command tab. Create two safari windows (or FF, Chrome, doesn't matter - except that Apple shipped safari, so we'd expect that to be able to render a window to the screen correctly).
Full screen one. Switch to the other. Now, use just cmd-tab and cmd-` to get to the full screen safari window (cmd-` switches between windows in the same application, which is literally never the right thing, but I digress).
For what it's worth, the third party tool 'altTab' mostly fixes this.
Bonus MacOS UI bug: I had to exit altTab to confirm they still hadn't fixed cmd-`. When I re-opened it using cmd-space, finder defaulted to the version in ~/Downloads instead of /Applications, then read me the riot act about untrusted software trying to change accessibility settings.
One more thing: I'm still not using MacOS 26, so all my complaints are about the "last known good" release.
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.
I don't understand how we keep hearing so often here about Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail, while every practical productivity advice involves some undiscoverable trick, or combinations of tricks, that seems so arbitrary and obtuse. I don't like Mac, in large parts because of that. No amount of marketing and peer pressure will convince me of the superior elegance and sophistication of something that hates you for wanting windows maximised. Those hidden tricks only add insult to injury as pervasive reminders of your presumed inadequacy, that you need to suffer to have things your way, and that Apple is magnanimous to even let you have them.
Every system has its issues. It's really a question of which issues you can live with and which system ultimately fits your workflow best.
After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back. Even on Windows I find myself working the way I do on macOS. Full screening every app made more sense on a 1024x768 screen (or smaller). Once I moved to a widescreen display (which happened to coincide with getting my first mac) running full screen felt like the wrong move most of time.
Web pages would look something like this:
Making the window smaller meant less wasted space and less blinding white space. Once I got used to that idea, it carried over to most other apps.> After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back.
Sorry if this comes across as disrespectful, but it smells like Stockholm Syndrome. You are choosing not to use the full extent of your screen estate, and that is your fine choice, but that is no excuse for making it hard. If you compound the whitespace, the thick borders and the generally oversized UI controls, not much of "productive space" remains available to get the work done. I am not interested in macOS as a content-consumption-first vehicle, though that's clearly where Apple is steering.
It is situational but I think on a modern wide screen(or screens) if it is a single text-like document(like a web page or a terminal) you want 2 or perhaps 3 side by side. if the app implements it's own window management(like blender) a single full screen is best. Overlapping windows are important to have, but almost never desirable, it usually happens because you ran out of room.
The problem I have with this is that I was using a 1600x1200 21" display in 2000, and got used to workflows for it back then.
I am currently running a 16" display at a similar fractional scaled resolution (because Apple stopped understanding DPI after shipping the first LaserWriter, apparently).
Over that time, my eyes have not gotten better to match display DPI, so I'd rather have web sites just adjust the font size so that there are a reasonable number of words per line instead of rendering whitespace.
Non-full-screen windows would make more sense if Apple supported tiling properly, like most Linux WMs and also modern Windows.
MacOS sort of supports tiling in a "program manager shipped it + got promoted" sort of way, but you have to hover over the window manager buttons, which is slower than just manually arranging stuff. If there are any keyboard shortcuts to invoke tiling, or a way to change the WM buttons to not suck, I have not found them.
1600x1200 is still a 4:3 aspect ratio, I think I agree that scaling that makes sense. Full screen really got problematic with 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios. That's when the empty gutters in most apps, and especially websites, became really pronounced.
As for tiling in macOS...
You can use the mouse to drag windows into tiled positions. Grab a window and when your cursor hits the side, corner, or top edge of the screen, it will indicate the tiling position, much like AeroSnap on Windows from some years back. You can also hold the Option key while holding the window to get the tiling regions to show up without moving all the way to the edge.
Keyboard shortcuts exist as well. Go to Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts... In the dialog that opens, go to Windows. There you can see all the options and customize them if you'd like. Or set shortcuts for things that might not have one yet.
If for some reason dragging the windows around doesn't work, go to Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> the Windows heading. There are toggles to enable or disable dragging to tile, and the Option key trick. You can also turn off the margins on tiled Windows, which you'd probably want to do.
I've never been a big fan of window tiling myself. There was a time when I needed a lot of different windows visible at all times, but that hasn't been the case in a long time. I find tiling makes things too big or small, it's never what I actually want. I drag the window up to the top of the screen to invoke Fill from time to time, but that's about it.
This is just that things are (poorly) designed now as mobile-only and not even mobile-first.
Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail
That was the Mac in the 1990s. It was designed for, and highly usable with, a one-button mouse. It didn't have hidden context menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. Everything was visible in the menu bar and discoverable. The Finder was spatially aware with a high degree of persistence that allowed you to develop muscle memory for where icons would appear onscreen every time you opened a folder.
There was almost nothing hidden or lurking in the background, unlike today (my modern Mac system has 500 running processes right now, despite having only 15 applications open). We've had decades of feature creep since the classic Mac OS, which has made modern Macs extremely hard to use (relatively speaking).
It's been more than 10+ years that I've been able to Option+Click the green button to fill the screen. Works for any app, and always has, unless that app explicitly disallows resizing. That's not recent.
Wow, I learned something new.
Why is it that some of the most useful features in Apple products are impossible to find on your own? I recently also learned about "three finger swipe to undo" in iOS instead of shaking the damn thing like it owes me money.
rectangle [1] is pretty much essential for me because of this. I use only a few keypresses (maximize window, move to one of the halves of the screen horizontally) but that is enough. My mouse very rately interacts with the borders of any window, or those buttons. I had to click on the green one that you mentioned in order to see what it did (yuck).
[1] https://rectangleapp.com/
I use a third party tool with shortcut keys that cycle between: full height, left half of screen; full height, right half of screen; full height, full width.
It works well for me, makes it easy to get two things side by side without wasting space.
by only recently do you mean 15 years ago with Lion?
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.
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).
The spatial Finder was something different: having each folder open a new window, and that particular folder's window always re-opening in the same position on screen, with the same window size and same layout of files inside. Having the position of each folder remain consistent and persistent allows you to remember a file's spatial location much as you would for a printed document on a physical desk (exactly where you left it), rather than having to recall its path in the file system hierarchy.
Obviously all of that works better if Finder windows don't usually fill the screen, but it's not a hard requirement.
With the classic OS, all the windows were supposed to work this way. And it seems most apps still do remember their window positions, making it easy to find them. (Expose even keeps the positions consistent when you 'zoom-out'.) Which is why Mac users tend to position their windows rather than relying on alt-tab or the dock or another app-switcher.
(IMO the spacial Finder was designed around floppies and small folders and didn't work so well with hierarchical folder views, so no big loss...)
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.
I use a 40” 4K screen.
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!
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.
Projectors are way easier on the eyes than monitors though.
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!
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.
> The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.
It sounds to me you've never actually looked at a monitor display large swaths of white before, it's brighter than light hitting a wall for sure, even with the brightness down, extra so when the ambient lightning is dark too.
I've definitely seen large monitors that are unpleasantly bright in the dark, but I've also seen an overly bright projector that was similarly unpleasant. I genuinely don't understand why changing the backlight wouldn't fix everything. A projector's image isn't diffuse like a lightbulb, if it was you wouldn't see an image.
In principle, it's the same as staring at the moon Vs staring at the sun.
The fact that it's bright outside when the sun is up might help, but it's nowhere near enough to compensate!
I too have a huge monitor. How anyone can use one without a tiling window manager is beyond me
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.
Without scaling, those rounded corners look not so rounded.
Computers were better with square corners anyway.
interesting! But, the default scaling makes them look bigger.
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.
Maybe this explains some of the bizarre questions I've gotten from mac designers.
The other day I was explaining to one that their designs fixed width looks silly once it got up towards 4k resolutions. But the designers main concern was if people actually used full screen browsers on 4k monitors and if there was any point in thinking about the design at that resolution.
There are plenty of times I enjoy have 2 browsers side by side of even 4 browsers in a square, and being able to do that is one of the benefits of having a 4k monitor. But without a doubt the majority of my time is spent with a full size browser window open, and I observe the same from all the other windows/linux users I manage that use a 4k monitor.
In service of keeping this post simple, I've ignore system display/ui scaling. But still... the question/assumption from the mac designer completely blew my mind.
And actually typing that all out just unlocked a bunch of memories about how many times I've been:
The same process happens when I need a mac user to get to an apps settings that on a windows/linux computer would normally be under something like File > Preferences/Settings. They have no idea what I'm talking about or know just barely enough to know they don't remember how to do it and panic.Then I have to go google it and remember that CMD+comma(⌘+,) exists and reveal it to the mac user like it's actual black magic. And then I immediately forget about it until 6 months later when I need to support a mac user again and I repeat the whole cycle again.
On Mac OS Settings is located in the menu named after the program, left of File and Edit. For example Firefox > Settings.
Yes MacOS breaks down the user until they give up on window management
That's because windows management on osx is terrible.
> 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.
Bring back the floating toolbars of the early 2000's and it'd be fine.
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.
This has always been quintessential Mac for me. First thing I noticed people do on macs much more than PCs was not expanding the windows. Windows are always just floating around. There's no equivalent to the maximize button, it's funny but I don't even know anymore what that "maximize" button on macs does but I remember it's not what I would expect.
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.
[1] https://rectangleapp.com/
Exact same for me - but I also use the shortcut to move windows between monitors.
I use cmd+tab and cmd+~ a ton also as I have multiple browser profiles and windows open and usually a few instances of ide with different projects.
And always close tabs with cmd+w and apps with cmd+q to avoid running apps with no visible windows.
I feel super productive with this workflow, never need to fiddle with manual resize.
When someone is screen sharing and they have a bunch of random sized windows it drives me crazy.
Hey, workflow buddy! I do the exact same. I feel seriously handicapped without these shortcuts.
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).
I know lots of people on laptop screens who don't maximize windows. It seems weird to me to only use like 80% of the screen's real estate, but sure, whatever.
On large external monitors, I think it makes total sense not to have every window maximized, though. Probably less usable that way.
I almost never use full screen windows on a Mac. Things like video are full screen, but that's a swipe to another workspace. Half-screen windows on a 27" screen are already bigger than a sheet of letter paper. Lots happens in terminal windows, which vary a bit, but are usually around 100x60, and maybe 1/6 of the screen.
I do have Rectangle installed, so apps generally get at most the left or right half of the screen, with a shortcut for badly behaved websites that need 2/3 to look right. Apps are usually pretty good about remembering window positions, so mostly you futz with it once and you're done.
Actually yes, I have all windows overlapping and none expanded to fill the screen, unless I'm really doing something very specific that needs as much space as possible. But the rounded edges are still slightly annoying.
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, 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.
“Maximising” windows full screen, apart from the genuinely-full-screen-takeover mode you can put windows in (where they take a virtual desktop slot too) has never been an idiomatic part of the Macintosh UI, since the beginning. The “zoom” button traditionally meant “toggle between a user defined window size, and a size that is just big enough to avoid scroll bars appearing, where possible”. It goes back to the spatial desktop metaphor.
Personally I try and work with that as much as possible, though it’s not always ideal.
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 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 never understood running apps in full screen. Unless it's an IDE, Video Editor, or some other app with tools filling all nooks and crannies, I want windows that fit the content. I don't want to launch a text or document editor in full screen, read a PDF in full screen. Typically I don't even want to watch a video full screen. I also generally don't want tiling. I want to arrange windows with parts peeking out behind other windows to reference while I'm working on something else. I want some sense of "space" related to where I left a window.
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.
I use several non-fullscreen windows over desktop. Stage manager makes switching between them very convenient. But I do use full screen windows, they live in their separate spaces. I see no reason whatsoever to maximise any window without it going full screen mode
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 almost never expand an application to be full-screen, even on my laptop. This despite the fact that I'll resize an application's window to fill the whole screen except for the dock. I think that's why I don't maximize it: I want the dock to remain accessible.
A lot of stupid things about Mac window management stems from the mistake of forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen. This essentially turns your entire desktop into ONE application's window, within which its actual windows float around.
Historically this led to the Mac's penchant for apps that spawned an irritating flotilla of windows that you had to herd around your screen. Not only did this deny users a way to minimize the whole app at once, but it also sucked because you could see everything on your desktop (or other apps' UIs) THROUGH the UI of the application you were trying to use. A dysfunctional mess.
Around 15 years ago, I estimate, the huge advantage of a single application window finally permeated the Apple mindset and things have gotten much better in that regard. But Apple should have abandoned the single menu in the transition to OS X, and put menus where they belong: on applications' main frames. That would make the desktop a truly unlimited workspace and eliminate the daily irritation of the menu changes its contents behind the user's back because he clicked on another application's window (perhaps to move it).
Multiple times a day I minimize an application and then attempt to do something in the application that's now filling the screen... only to find that the menu still belongs to the application that isn't even shown. It's just so dumb.
But then... this is the GUI that, for decades, would only let you resize windows from ONE corner and NO edges. Apple grudgingly, half-assedly, and unreliably addressed that in the 2000s, only now to make it even less reliable in the shambolic Tahoe UI.
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)
> 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
Strange, I constantly get annoyed by how slow and unresponsive the Mac's tiling is when dragging windows to the edge. At the top it has at least half a second delay for no reason. But at least the newest version now has caught up with Windows 7.
Turn off System Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> Windows -> "Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen"
I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE fullscreen would be too big.
But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.
I do this on macOS much more than I do on Windows, yes. MacOS flows a lot better if you're willing to adopt its window management style.
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.
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
> Does anyone actually do this?
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?
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.
I’ve been using Macs for development for 20 years, and even on a small laptop screen I don’t expand windows to fill the screen. So I guess, yes, there are a few weirdos out there at least?
Consider me another weirdo. I don’t know why anyone would use full screen. Even games I want in a window…
It is when the application comes with it's own window manager, blender comes to mind.
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.
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 use a mix of Cmd-Tab and a hot key to see all non-minimized apps (Mission Control?) to pick from. I’ve realized that that I’m faster at seeing the color of the window I’m looking for than remembering the app name.
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.
That’s because you use the button to make them whole screen?
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.
> compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows
Or just use the taskbar, which is literally made for switching between windows. Or it was, before Microsoft forgot its purpose.
Still not my style though. When you close a window, all windows to the right of it in the taskbar get moved leftwards. This breaks spatial memory.
You could say the same about the Dock in Mac OS.
Maximizing everything whether the document fills the screen or not is very Windows user behavior. macOS is not meant to be used that way.
A lot of it is just old Mac UI dogma. On a multi-monitor or ultrawide desk the default behavior still acts like everyone wants a few polite little windows drifting in the middle, so browsers, IDEs, and other dense apps start half-crippled until you drag everything into place by hand. Apple seems weirdly attached to the idea that the desktop should feel like an oversized tablet, and it's anoying.
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.
It does weird things in multi monitor because dragging a window on top of the newly “maximized” window somehow does not work
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 don't maximize windows because it means a 1 second delay, as for some reason Mac OS still does the hardcoded workspace switching animation even for that. Which means entering/leaving fullscreen in a video player is also delayed every time. I don't get it, not even the accessibility settings can disable this waste of time.
I just use yabai...
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).
Yes. I think the assumptions are made by people with two displays of at least 32" and ≥4K resolution.
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.
I'm not sure if I understood correctly but i3 has tabbed windows and no window titles
I seem to remember Windows XP using tabs in a lot of its settings pages - and possibly earlier versions as well.
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.
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.
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?
Opera had tabs. Tabbed under Unix had tabs. Dillo had tabs. TCL/TK had damn tabs in 1997.
Thank you for the additional examples of how the major OS vendors failed to respond to clear need within the market.
KDE actually had it for many years, until Gnome pushed for CSDs, and with (at the time) CSD-only wayland that feature disappeared.
I never work in full screen. It’s bizarre to me that people do. I don’t need full screen for anything, even Pycharm.
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.
> full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space
Any space not used for the task I'm focused on is wasted. For me the actual problem is that switching apps/windows is too slow because of UI animations.
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.
writing this reply on a 13 inch macbook air...
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…
Mac OS has become what would happen if Harley Davidson merged with Volvo Truck and some high up said that to "reduce costs" and "homogenize the brand", the design groups needed to be merged and put forward a unified design. If I was less lazy, I'd have a !AI thing whip me up a mashup drawing.
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.
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?
What about the minimize and maximize buttons being swapped without any way to customize it. That one drives me crazy.
The buttons are not swapped. The close button is the one further away from the center, closest to the corner.
Same as in Windows. It just makes sense.
What do you mean swapped?
That usually, maximize is next to the close button and all buttons are usually on the right side of the window bar
Oh that's just how it is on Windows though. Seems like on mac the minimize button provides a buffer between maximize and close. I'd rather accidentally minimize if I'm trying to maximize than close the window
Come to kde, you can customise everything
Apps and windows things is actually great though if you learn yo use it and don't disable minimizing windows to the dock
I keep jearing this but after years of using MacOS Is still hate the windowing behavior. There is already a way for windowless apps to run - its in the top right corner of my menu bar. Why not use this if you _really_ need windowless apps to run in the background? Also dont get me started on window switching...
It makes absolutely no sense to have a windowless app. Why would anyone run photoshop without a window?
There are apps that they need to run in the background, sure. They have a spot in the menubar.
Oh no I forgot, you can only have 5 of them. Not 6. Why? Because FU. Go buy a third party app (bartender) that records your entire screen to do basic app management that the OS should do.
I hate MacOS.
Seems like it just depends what you're used to, change is frustrating and sometimes totally unnecessary.
Change without further qualifier implies doing something equivalent or better by different means or with a different look. What people are observing is a specific kind of change: regression, where the experience of appearance or result of action are worsened or no longer an option at all. It's a trend I've noticed in Apple since the move to unibody.
I use this https://github.com/FelixKratz/JankyBorders to try and have a consistent feel to it, but I wish I could make it less rounded
Not a mac user here - why can't you use the same method to set the corner radius to 0.1 or something and effectively turn of the roundness, but without root?
>The reason why you need to disable SIP, is that to edit the dynamic libraries that system apps like Safari (which has crazy bad corners) use, you need to edit system libraries that exist the root.
Reminds me of Adobe Gripes (https://www.tumblr.com/adobegripes).
When Adobe suite was de facto standard for designing and coding interfaces (you know, Flash) their own software was so immensely bad that there was enough material for a guy to make fun of them on a daily basis for a good couple of years.
Send Apple feedback https://www.apple.com/feedback/
I’m honestly intensely curious what you thought this comment would contribute.
That's not a thread you want to pull on, it applied to the majority of the comments on the internet.
I tried something similar while building my tool site — biggest issue was SEO indexing. Fixed it by improving internal linking instead of relying on sitemap.
I have never been happier to be a long time Linux user. Our systems are working significantly better than ever before and I have personally converted more people to Linux in the last year than the 15 years before that.
Particularly KDE. They have had some ups and downs but finally they have built a great foundation with Plasma and Plasma dark mode with Breeze is such a great balance of flexibility and fairly consistent look and feel. I stuck around with Gnome for too long in the name of simplicity but once you appreciate that Plasma gets out of your way once things are exactly how you want it, I have come to appreciate not having to install extensions for everyday "normal" things a lot more.
Plasma has been a bit buggy since v6 :(
they tried to do something with remembering "how you left things" between sessions, and even when disabled things are still weird...
Also some power management related hooks are not working as well as before. Like if you put the computer to sleep at night, and wake it up in the morning, the automatic dark-to-light theme switch doesn't trigger. at least not always.
Still the best system to work with though!
One way to make the mac consistent
I've been running Sonoma and it's going to stay that way for foreseeable future.
wish I did that :(
This isn’t a part of macOS 26 that bothers me, honestly. I don’t spend a lot of time stacking windows and measuring their corners.
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.
These inconsistent corner radii are actually intentional, FWIW - the radius depends on the window’s function (main, utility, etc.). I don’t think it looks great, but there’s no lack of attention to detail.
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.
You have a truly Magic Mouse if yours charges in 15 minutes. In my experience, it is hours to charge from zero, which until I put an always-running monitor in the menu bar for the mouse battery level is what you are guaranteed to have since there is no other indicator of mouse battery level.
I used to roll my eyes at the complaints until I actually had one of these, and it is appallingly bad engineering. Especially since the previous design, which was functionally identical just needed a 10 second battery swap.
I truly hate it, so so much. Mentally I'm already planning out what OS I'm going to migrate to.
Try both gnome and kde if you come on linux, and remember that on kde you can customize anything you don't like.
I don't either, the only thing that annoys me is it's much harder to resize windows, so the usability is worse
Somehow this little hidden setting via CLI
defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES
Makes thing bearable....note log out to see it change.
You still need to then turn transparency off via settings see
this
https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into...
FYI, the article incorrectly claims that SIP just controls write access to /. It does way more than that.
I don't see where it says that. Can you provide a direct quote?
Footnote 2.
The footnote 2 link doesn't actually work for me, for whatever reason.
What does it say?
"Arguable, since you just loose security over /root, which is not a big deal if someone already gained access to your machine, at least for me."
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...
The link or the footnote itself doesn’t render for you? It renders on mobile Safari, just by scrolling to the bottom of the page.
great catch on the corner inconsistency. hadnt noticed until reading this now i cant unsee it.
this is actually one of the reasons i ended up going all in on a tiling wm (aerospace). once youre tiling, windows are edge to edge so the corner radius thing mostly disappears. the trade off is giving up floating windows,
the DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES approach is clever though. making everything consistently rounded is way more pragmatic than fighting apples design decisions or disabling SIP.
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.
I'm sure they'll try to market this as a feature so you can see how many windows you have open
I'm not sure if these selectors are hit in SwiftUI or not.
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.
Ads in a start menu can die in a fire though.
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.
This was one of the first things I noticed after upgrade and was confused. I had an understanding that people in Apple UX are extremely meticulous when it comes to every single little tiny detail. I guess those times are over.
They still obsess about it but they seem to be idiots, and always have been. Nobody has ever been able to explain reasonably why "about this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every MacOS program - it isn't useful exept maybe once a year. It's a ridiculous UX choice, always has been. Don't get me started on Finder.
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.
Wouldn’t “insanely great”/“it’s shit” be more Steve than “genius”/“it’s shit”?
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were a team, and Jobs would regularly tell people their work was "shit" if it didn't make sense.
Apple traditionally burned out its talent, and is no longer structured to follow Jobs original vision. There is a lot of goodwill with the users, but just like Sony/HP/IBM/Microsoft/Sun it can't last forever. The process-people entrench themselves, and ruin everything... just as Jobs predicted. =3
At some point in time, Apple used nice software to be able to sell expensive but mediocre hardware.
Now they sell expensive but nice hardware and they have mediocre software.
It seems you can only choose one out of three, nice hardware, nice software, good price. Apple is always choosing high price, and they either gave customers nice hardware or nice software, but not both.
Well, this is a business model, not a coincidence... They are in the battle of selling fresh hardware each and every year consistenly
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...)
> 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/
Y’all are wild…
I feel like the only dude on the planet who uses fullscreen workspaces on Mac.
The number of times I have noticed the corner of my windows is precisely zero because each important application gets its own workspace, so the window frame doesn't get rendered. Sometimes I'll tile two windows side by side on my external monitor but even then this is a complete non issue for me.
Are you guys just running everything on the one desktop workspace in windowed mode? That seems like madness.
I asked this same question years ago in one of those threads that was all windows people complaining about cmd+tab. No responses.
That means there are exactly two of us.
I hate rounded corners. I use stylus to apply "*{border-radius: 0 !important;}" to a bunch of sites, including YouTube.
Half the people in IT have no business being here.
I can't say I've had any issues with the corners, or noticed any difference after upgrading to macOS 26. But this is neat.
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.