Double click the title bar then. Still, the maximization in macOS is plainly stupid, as it frequently doesn't do the expected maximization.

> Double click the title bar then.

That's hardly discoverable though.

In fairness, it's a standard behaviour across several OSes.

Not across applications, sadly... Chrome just likes to stretch the window horizontally a little and then extend the window vertically to the top and bottom of its current display.

Hey, Google! When I double click the title bar, it means fill the !@%&%#* display!!

Just another reason why I like Firefox.

I really liked the old nuanced "full size" behaviour. Unlike Windows "Maximize" it would only increase the window size just enough so that all its contents where visible. This was neat, and elegant, and really showed considered design as well as the OS taking an interest in what was "in" it's windows not just the displayable area of the screen. I thought the Ctrl-F fullscreen behaviour in Lion was perfectly fine. It was slightly dissonant with overall windowing system control but I thought that was fine - going to full-screen seems to me more of a system feature than an window manager feature (it subverts the window manager to a certain extent), but maybe I'm just getting old ...

I agree the old window zoom, as it was called, was the best. I know Windows user hate it, and so many of the recent changes seem to have been to placate Windows user complaints. I liked my Mac the way it was. We don't need to appeal to Windows users.

People who really like Windows (including me) generally seem to dislike the full-screen button in OS X though, so how is that placating anyone?

Everywhere I look I find people saying that window management in Windows is miles ahead of OS X. Even from people who wouldn't want to use Windows. If Apple wanted to placate those people, they would make the green button maximize by default, get rid of that ghastly global menu bar, fix the bad keyboard acceleration, make the Dock even more like the taskbar and add window snapping among a few other things.

I'm hoping some day someone at Apple will see the light. It only took them twenty years to realize that letting users resize a window by any corner or edge is a good idea and that one-button mice were really not a good idea so maybe by 2036 it will all change.

In Windows everything really wants to take up the whole screen. If you drag a window near an edge, it'll try and maximize! If you double click, it maxmizes! If you click the button, it maximizes! Shoot, in Windows 8 they wanted everything to start in full screen with that modern UI.

As much as I love overlapping and reasonably sized windows and having many windows strewn about my very large monitor, I'll see a post on Reddit about how websites aren't designed to look good when maximized on a 21:9 monitor, and then I'll face palm. It's weird.

What's ghastly about the global menu bar? I think it's an amazing improvement over Windows.

All that stuff sounds awful, please stick to using Windows.

Of course. Why wouldn't I?

Ah see I like that behaviour. I've never once wanted to fill the screen with an app without putting it in fullscreen, I just don't see what the point of doing that would be.

> I've never once wanted to fill the screen with an app without putting it in fullscreen, I just don't see what the point of doing that would be.

For me, it’s for ease of working with multiple windows. I frequently work with multiple windows at one time, or multiple programs, and Apple’s full screen is awkward for that.

Switching windows invokes a cute but lengthy animation. I can’t have a window take most of a full screen, leaving a corner for clicking to the other window. ⌘-tab works very poorly, especially on multi-monitor desktops, because it forces you to remember implementation details about which application has windows on which desktop. ⌘-` window switching doesn’t work with full-screen. It’s just a mess.

Even in web browsing, I don’t use only tabs. I use multiple windows, so I don’t full-screen those, either.

> I just don't see what the point of doing that would be.

So you can still see the Dock and the Menu bar without having to do anything?

I always maximize and never use full screen because I don't want to hide the most useful parts of my OS...but I can imagine that visual artists might use it a lot.

The point is being able to see the menu bar (with the current date/time etc.) without hovering the mouse over it.

To be honest, this comment section is a bit mind-blowing to me, it really just goes to show how the behaviour that I take for granted isn't at all the default for other people. I would never, ever, have thought about people wanting to maximise the windows without actually hiding the menu bar.

I agree. I broke down and got "Better Snap Tool" and just avoid the maximize icon entirely.

Get Spectacles, which is free, then enjoy making a window maximised (without making it fullscreen) by pressing option command f.

Also, moving windows between monitors, making them side-by-side etc are insanely easy.

Thank you very much!

To my surprise - or not, now that I think of it - I actually had Spectacles installed already, but I had not come around to getting acquainted with it.

Major facepalm for me... ;-) Now, off to put on the spectacles... ;-)