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Comment by jablan | Hacker News Reader

Well, as an occasional MacOS user, it still pisses me off when I discover that maximize button is in fact full screen button.

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As far as I know, that part of the UX will remain consistent with macOS Big Sur, and it'll still piss you off. :)

(You can hold down Option and use the green button as its old "Zoom" function, but I think there should be a system preference to reverse that so it's zoom by default and you hold down Option to go into full screen.)

Yeah, except it is NOT a "maximize" button and never was. macOS just doesn't do maximized apps the way Windows and some Linux DEs do.

Before Yosemite the green button worked like a maximize button, and you had a separate fullscreen button on the other side. Now you need to ⌥-click the green button to maximize.

No, that's not what it does on macOS. It simply makes the window larger and has done that ever since it was introduced, I believe. (I think for many document-based apps this just means to make the window taller, for example.)

IIRC the green button was "zoom", meaning it should adapt the window size to the window content, which in most of the cases resulted with maximizing.

I know, but it as close to maximize as it gets. That's not my point, but that the behavior has changed dramatically.

I've been a full-time Mac user for nearly 20 years and I'm kind of with jablan here. :)

And it's still fundamentally flawed as ever. (since the suggested behavior in the HIG presumes contextual intent is something that's generally clear or even decidable from the content.)

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