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I'm currently working for a startup, after spending most of the past decade working for financial firms and Fortune 500 environments. Being trapped for so long

I'm currently working for a startup, after spending most of the past decade working for financial firms and Fortune 500 environments. Being trapped for so long in the world of "mandatory-Windows-and-you're-lucky-to-get-admin-rights-over-your-own-machine", I practically jumped at the chance to take a MacBook Pro instead. After awhile though, I have to say... "meh". Don't get me wrong, the hardware is absolutely lovely. Great battery life, eye-pleasing screen resolution, comfortable keyboard, and the first laptop touchpad I've ever seen that's just as nice to use as an external mouse. However, for me there are just as many annoying quirks in OS X as there are in Windows or Ubuntu/Mint. I dislike the single global menu bar model. I absolutely HATE HATE HATE the fact that "maximize" means something different from one moment to the next... that you have to hold down the "Shift" key and double-click the title bar to make your Chrome window maximize in the expected manner. Etc. Moreover, I've become aware that I spend 99% of my day toggling between an IDE and a web browser, both of which are nearly identical across all platforms. I can see how UNIX-y underpinnings would help someone who works more closely with the console or with UNIX-y programming languages. But for me as a Java guy, it just doesn't matter. If anything, I'm slightly less productive because I still get the keyboard shortcuts mixed up several times a day. I'm not trying to hate on my MacBook Pro, it's a great piece of hardware. It's just that knowing what I know now, I wouldn't spend my own money on one for personal use. It turns out that my frustrations over the years have had less to do with Windows itself... and more about the fact of being told to use Windows. I'm kinda over that now.

stephenr 11y ago
The green button has never been a "maximise" button. For a long time it was just a "zoom" button. Now it's a zoom/full screen button.
- StevePerkins 11y ago
  Correct, but I didn't mean to refer to the green button. I was simply talking about double-clicking the Chrome title bar. By default, this expands Chrome to the "appropriate" size for whichever website you have loaded in the current tab that moment. To get the normal maximize effect that one would expect from double-clicking a title bar in Windows or any Linux desktop environment, you have to hold down the "Shift" key while double-clicking. Actually, I'm not sure if it's Google or Apple who is responsible for this specific issue, but it's inconsistent either way. Chrome doesn't work like this on any other platform, and none of the other Mac applications I commonly use (e.g. IntelliJ, Atom, Terminal, Spotify) behave this way on OS X.
  - stephenr 11y ago
    Double clicking the title bar has in my experience, always been a synonym for clicking the non-close, non-minimise/button, on any desktop OS since about 2000 (classic Mac OS had "minimise in place") - on Windows and most Linux DE's that means maximise. On OS X, it means zoom, which is deliberately app specific behaviour. I find very few apps that truly need the full size of the display, and those that do (i.e. IDE's, Photos/iPhoto, etc) usually do just that when you hit zoom. If you really want the browser window maximised, scale it up once and if it's a halfway decent Mac App it will retain that window size & position until you change it. Or make use of full screen mode for that app maybe?

stephenr 11y ago

The green button has never been a "maximise" button. For a long time it was just a "zoom" button. Now it's a zoom/full screen button.

StevePerkins 11y ago
Correct, but I didn't mean to refer to the green button. I was simply talking about double-clicking the Chrome title bar. By default, this expands Chrome to the "appropriate" size for whichever website you have loaded in the current tab that moment. To get the normal maximize effect that one would expect from double-clicking a title bar in Windows or any Linux desktop environment, you have to hold down the "Shift" key while double-clicking. Actually, I'm not sure if it's Google or Apple who is responsible for this specific issue, but it's inconsistent either way. Chrome doesn't work like this on any other platform, and none of the other Mac applications I commonly use (e.g. IntelliJ, Atom, Terminal, Spotify) behave this way on OS X.
- stephenr 11y ago
  Double clicking the title bar has in my experience, always been a synonym for clicking the non-close, non-minimise/button, on any desktop OS since about 2000 (classic Mac OS had "minimise in place") - on Windows and most Linux DE's that means maximise. On OS X, it means zoom, which is deliberately app specific behaviour. I find very few apps that truly need the full size of the display, and those that do (i.e. IDE's, Photos/iPhoto, etc) usually do just that when you hit zoom. If you really want the browser window maximised, scale it up once and if it's a halfway decent Mac App it will retain that window size & position until you change it. Or make use of full screen mode for that app maybe?