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 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.

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.

> Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content of the document inside.

It turns out that this approach works well for many applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.

I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12 windows open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used the Alt-Tab to get between them. Basically wherever it opened is where it stayed.

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.

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.

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

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/

I’m not trying to defend because I don’t like it either. But the Mac workflow has always been much more alt-tab focused than windows. With alt-tab and alt-shift-tab (reverse order) I feel like I can fly through my apps at the speed of thought.

Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with the expectation that they kind of just float around. But at least in Mac you can scroll on an app that isn’t in focus…

I never have any window in the fullscreen/maximized mode. Some are pretty large, such as IDE, and they sometimes touch one or more edges of the screen/dock/panel, but never occupy the entire space. That was true even on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI.

That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.

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.

> 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?

Yeah this is the assumption, even pre-OSX. I won't claim to know the majority of mac users, especially not since the large uptick in the 2010's... but it seems, in my experience, very much the norm to not maximize windows and I wouldn't be surprised if people who do maximize are mostly Windows converts (not that there's anything wrong with that).

It’s very rare that I maximize an application. I’m always stacking. However, I don’t think it’s an optimizing assumption: I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen

In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple terminal windows, eg)

Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where you do everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it full screen all the time and I get why that works for some people. I'm not one of those folks and I use separate IDE, terminal, browsers, and other windows and use window management to allow myself to see multiple of them at the same time and switch between them by clicking on what I want.

Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.

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.

MacOS assumes you won’t full screen every app because all of them ship with large enough, high enough resolution monitors that full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space. Unlike on cheap laptops with 1080p screens.

I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope it’s rare.

I 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.

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 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.

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.

People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts they work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.

I've always disliked MacOS because it is so janky about maximizing windows.

I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I have OCD about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of each other. I like to focus on one screen at a time.

Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use that on a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting between sites, but that's about it.

Maximizing everything whether the document fills the screen or not is very Windows user behavior. macOS is not meant to be used that way.

I just use yabai...

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.

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.

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 never work in full screen. It’s bizarre to me that people do. I don’t need full screen for anything, even Pycharm.

[dead]