Quote:Original post by lethalhamsterOne more thing that gets be about OSX is the windows NEVER maximize. You can hit the little green Maximize bubble all day and it wont fit itself to the screen! That's just a personal thing though, all my apps on my Windows machine open up maximized. I don't need to see the desktop. Then, some Mac users will say "If everything is maximized how do you see the windows behind the current app you have open?" Windows has this cool thing called a Task Bar. It shows all the open windows you have up on you computer! So If I am working on something and I need two Explorer(the file browser, not IE) windows open I can open them and see them both in the task bar! Yay!
I'm convinced that this is mainly just a matter of how you use the computer. Some Windows users get used to each application taking up the entire screen; this is great for that one application but not so good for the other apps that want screen space as well (whether they actually need that screen space is another question). Mac users get used to applications that only make use of part of the screen, and henc allow them to see the windows of other apps behind the one that currently has focus. I do actually have one good use case for this behaviour - I spend a lot of time on IRC, not actively chatting, but keeping an eye on what's going on. Typically I have a web browser that has focus and occupies the upper portion of the screen, while the IRC channels hug the bottom edge. This allows me to watch chat while still browsing. And yes, I'm aware that you can do this in Windows as well. It's something that a Windows user who automatically maximizes every window might not think of, though.
In general, the Windows paradigm is one app = one window, while the Mac is one app = many windows. Where a Windows user would open another instance of a program to do two things at once (e.g. two IE instances, or two PuTTY sessions), a Mac user would open another window (e.g. two Safari windows, or two Terminal wondows). Since windows within a given application share screen real estate, it doesn't make sense to automatically maximize each one; that'd mean that at any given time, only a fraction of your application can be seen.
Incidentally, my biggest pet peeve with Windows is that it doesn't task-switch like Macs do. Alt-tab gets you from any one open window to any other window. So if you have lots of open windows, it'll take you forever to find what you want. Macs group windows under their application "owners", so Cmd-Tab only takes you from one app to another. Then if you want to switch windows in that app, you hit Cmd-`. On Windows it's a major pain to, say, switch from one open browser window to two open SSH sessions. Of course, on a Mac it's a pain to switch from one browser window to
one SSH session (assuming you have another open session sitting around).
