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From what has been shown in the previews, I think it's very likely that in W8.2, Metro apps will:

1. be able to be "restored" from fullscreen to become regular windows, and

2. obey a preference in the Control Panel to always start them as windows rather than fullscreen.

I expect people will forget almost all of their objections to W8 after that.

This is the thing I had been hoping for more than anything else for Windows 8.1. And yeah, I will forget all my objections to Win8 after that, because when you get down to it that's really my only objection to Win8.

I've got no real complaint with Metro apps, as such. What I've got a complaint with is that they don't behave like every Windows application I've used since approximately 1990. Not because there's anything broken about the existing desktop PC interaction model that Microsoft had been incrementally refining for decades, mind you. No, it's really just that Microsoft : Captain Ahab :: iDevices : white whale.

Fullscreen apps work great on a Macbook, and you only need to know two simple trackpad gestures: three fingers side to side, and three fingers up. And yes, you can break out of it by mashing ESC.

It's an interface clearly designed for a multi-touch trackpad, and it's a joy to use. It makes a 13" laptop screen feel a lot less cramped. Contrast to Win8 which is an overcomplicated mess, filled with interface decisions that are suboptimal for a mouse or trackpad interface.

Especially with the low screen resolution of the 11" MacBook Air, full-screen mode becomes essential. On a 27" 1440p display, not so much. I personally use full screen mode for iTunes (mainly so that iTunes is always a quick multi-swipe away) but not for anything else.

I think the animations on Mac OS make full screen mode great. Slide some fingers on the trackpad and you switch to the next full screen app or virtual desktop. On Win8 it's a jarring zoom in zoom out animation, without any ability to 'peek', at least using a mouse/keyboard interface on a desktop.

I actually quite like OS X fullscreening on my 15" rMBP. I usually keyboard back and forth between apps instead...I can never quite get the three finger swipes working reliably. It even works pretty well with multiple desktops.

But until Mavericks, it was horribly horribly broken and useless on multi-monitor setups and even now isn't all that great.

Like you, I hardly ever maximize windows. I have Win8.1 on my work laptop and the only reason I didn't reformat it is because of StartIsBack. With StartIsBack, I basically get all the benefits of Win8 with very few of the drawbacks.

Really? You might have been lucky there, because I always maximize my windows on a 14-inch screen.

What Windows 8 doesn't give you while full screen is the task bar, which used to show the user what is behind the active program.

Users don't like not knowing what's going on.

You maximize because your screen real estate is limited. Try doing the same in an 27-inch screen and it will look quite inconvenient.

Which brings me to one of my everlasting questions, although somehow unrelated to the topic. Why aren't screens square?

As you get further from a square, you get less screen area for a given diagonal. A 4:3 screen with a 19" diagonal gives you 173 square inches, but a 16:9 screen with the same diagonal is only 156 square inches. http://daleswanson.org/things/screensize.htm So it's all about picking the biggest possible number for the crummiest product.

Because televisions aren't square.

More precisely, because eyes (plural, operating as a single input) aren't square.

16x[9/10] sort-of matches the field of view we have.

Subjective, I know, but 4:3 was a lot more pleasant to work with, at least for me. 16:(9|10) might match movie aspect ratios better and thus would be better for watching them, but I do other things more often than watching movies on my computer screens (it's different for a TV, though).

Conversely, 16x(9|10) allows me to put 2x portrait documents next to one another comfortably. Alternatively, I can work on a document with a 2-page view.

They used to be. Mostly machines with dedicated monitors. Nice, beautiful square screens with gorgeous square pixels.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=298

I have 2 24" monitors and almost always maximize everything to full screen or snap windows side-by-side (Win-Left / Win-Right).

You don't need a large screen if you're going to leave all that space unused.

Because you have two eyes

I meant that rarely do I put the window in fullscreen mode, not maximize it. I frequently maximize too, but that still gives you the task bar. My problem was with 8/8.1's insistence on fullscreening the window.

For me, the answer is "just don't use Metro". I have 3 computers running Win8, only rarely do I use anything in Metro.

Why use Win8, then? Well, it has some nice small core OS improvements over Win7, licenses were cheap, and it will be supported for longer going forward.

If you ever get lost or stuck with a mouse&keyboard, all you have to remember is to hit the "Windows" key on the keyboard until you get to the Metro home screen. From there, Desktop Mode is one click away. Also, Alt+Tab works in Metro, and can take you to any process- metro or desktop.

If you ever get lost or stuck with a mouse&keyboard. . .

This is all true. But the fact that it's even possible to get so lost, and the fact that we don't feel feckless and asinine in sharing hints for how to get out of that situation on a forum for hackers. . . it still betrays a serious, disastrous user experience failure.

Having the user get stuck in situations where they don't know how to accomplish some specific task is probably always going to be an unavoidable risk. But to take the "I have no idea where I am and I have no idea how to get out" level of lost-ness experience that was previously only possible in command-line interfaces, and figure out how to re-create it in a windowed GUI. . . It's really a pretty impressive feat, when you think about it.

Honestly, I didn't want to rag on anybody, but I'm kind of surprised a forum full of hackers managed to get so stuck. Alt+Tab is something I would expect everyone here to know, and it was literally the first shortcut I tried when I got confused on my first foray with Win8. But I suppose use of the keyboard to navigate anything may be a dying art.

I utterly failed at helping my aunt figure out metro. I did use alt-tab. But there were multiple other points of failure. It's been long enough that I don't remember specifics, but I was utterly baffled despite being experienced with keyboard navigation.

What might only be a few moments of confusion for nerds is a brick wall to many other people.

Perhaps that's also something to do with what happened in Redmond. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Windows 8's UI mess is at least partially a product of letting a bunch of technology people get too far inside their own heads.

> It's why you infrequently see people using fullscreen mode in their browser unless they're watching videos.

Anecdotal, but in every place I've worked or been with people running Windows, most people run everything maximized and switch between applications. MS probably just took the hint that people don't like fiddling with lots of half expanded windows and designed the OS around it. Unfortunately, they did it all wrong for the Desktop.

It's never really been a good experience in OS X so it's just never become part of the cultural workflow. Full-screen mode in OS X (and well, also Windows) is also not the same as maximize on Windows and until pretty recently (Mavericks) was quite broken anyways.

> Anecdotal, but in every place I've worked or been with people running Windows, most people run everything maximized and switch between applications.

Were their monitors small? That could be a contributing factor.

Maybe it is a personal preference, but I never liked fullscreen applications for anything - I'd only maximise if I was focused on one application's content, and it was large enough that scrolling would be reduced significantly if I did so. At any given time I probably have several other things running, and I like to see what the other apps are doing and/or refer to them. I'm also not really a fan of tabbed browsing, since I often compare and look at several pages simultaneously, and with only tabs, I would otherwise have to remember the previous page's contents as I switched between them.

For me it's usually applications with either lots of UI (Outlook, Visual Studio, Eclipse) or lots of content (browser, Far Manager, consoles) that are maximized. Although depending on how I use the latter they might as well be windowed if necessary. Two monitors help in not needing to window applications all the time just to see two of them at the same time, though. Sadly a third monitor doesn't work with the machine here :|