>what's the deal with one HTML page that I don't even run

You sound like I spammer I once knew. He would always say things like "What's the big deal with one e-mail that you're not going to read anyway. Just delete it."

The mail icon in his Mac's dock showed over 29,000 unread messages. Spam just didn't bother him the way Windows popping up ads for Facebook doesn't bother you.

One might say "what's the big deal to buy new Mac if you want more RAM, paying premium for bad hardware". Another might say "What's the big deal not to play OverWatch with your friends and having unusable hibernate". I might say "what's the deal with those ads I can remove within a minute", yes. It's all about compromises. I'd like to have a perfect OS, but I have to choose between available alternatives.

I'm not sure how you would create a worse implementation of virtual desktops than Windows 10 has them:

- No indication of other workspaces existing.

- No indication of what applications are in those other workspaces.

- The keyboard shortcut for walking through desktops requires two hands (and in typical Windows fashion cannot be rebound).

I'm not familiar with macOS' implementation, so if you actually think that it's worse, then I would like to know how.

Also should be said, though, that you can replace the window manager on macOS, which should allow you to get most of the features of an actually good implementation of virtual desktops. I'm not aware of a way to do that on Windows.

I guess I'm using it differently, because I don't find those issues so important for me. I'm using desktops as a different computers for different states of mind. One desktop has some relaxing read (hacker news, for example, or reddit), some explorers, notepads with not so important stuff. 1-2 desktops for work projects, usually it's exactly one desktop. One desktop for gaming and related websites, discord, etc. I'm switching between them may be one or two times a day. I can see that if you're using multiple desktops for a single project, something like multiple displays and often switching between them, they might be not that usable.

macOS implementation was bad, because I accidentally switched between desktops all the time. It shows all launched apps in the dock from all desktops. If I'm working on my project, I don't want to see that I have Battle.net client launched and 10 unread notifications in Discord guild channel. If I'm clicking on Safari icon, I want to launch new window on current desktop, I don't want to switch to another desktop with some random website.

Anyway the main point of virtual desktops is that they are implemented at OS level. Actual interface is not very important, because if API exists, 3-rd party programs can embrace it. For example Windows 7 had virtual desktops implemented on system level (there wasn't UI to manage them), but API was very limited, for example it wasn't possible to move windows between desktops. Also applications usually weren't aware about those desktops and sometimes were outright buggy (for example you couldn't launch second Firefox window on another desktop).

I agree that the implementation is pretty hard to use by default. https://github.com/sdias/win-10-virtual-desktop-enhancer makes windows' virtual desktops usable though