But I don't know what "zoom" means in the context of a window. And the inconsistencies of my experiences with various apps didn't make it clear either. (e.g. the infamous mini-player for iTunes)

As for Shift-Click I tried it with Chrome and I thought you had made my day. However it didn't do anything different on Messages, nor Safari: it just stretched the window vertically. In my short survey of currently open apps, half were stretching vertically while the other was doing fullscreen. (be it Shift-click or plain click) Only Chrome acts differently.

Zoom tries to remove the scroll bars. It makes the window big enough so that the scroll bars disappear. If there are no scrollbars and the main content just automatically resizes with the window (e.g. in Aperture) it is equivalent to the maximize button.

The biggest problem with that is that developers make it work inconsistently.

Browse around iTunes until you find a track that doesn't quite fit horizontally. Click the "zoom" button, to make the window big enough. Oh wait, it doesn't.

If by "developers" you mean "Apple" then yes. I never use the "zoom" button because it exhibits apparently random behaviour.

Agreed. It's one of those "we'll figure this out later" things from the late 90's without any real programmatic constraints that led to a mishmash of pointless and unexpected behavior.

I personally can't come up with a good reason not to just remove the green ball entirely.

So the issue is iTunes, not the green button? And admittedly itunes behaviour is very well known, it's hardly surprising.

I completely agree with you. Don’t be so aggressive, be nice!

Apple should remove the zoom button. It’s not necessary, more confusing than anything.

I'm new to Macs so I may be missing something, but I tried your shift-click approach in a half dozen applications (including Apple ones). It didn't maximize any of the programs. I suppose a separate software program may enable this functionality, however.

He meant command-click.

I definitely didn't. I just tried Shift+Click'ing on Chrome, Terminal and Sublime Text 2. They all exhibited the Maximize/Restore functionality that I've been using in Windows for years.

No love in Safari. Not a fan of tools I can't rely on.

Ironically Safari is the only app I can't make work. But by God, who uses Safari? :P

Yep, my mistake, did some incorrect testing.

I'm a die-hard mac user, and even I can admit that their window management is atrociously bad. My only hope is that it was based on some stupid edict handed down by SJ, and now that he's out of the picture they'll finally get around to fixing it.

> I love angry rants from people that think every window manager has to act like Windows.

Wrong. They're from people who think every window manager should act consistently. This is decades of UI design and expected behavior being flushed down the toilet by a company for which NIH is religious dogma.

That Windows behaves the correct, expected way is an indictment on OS X, not its growing base of increasingly frustrated power users.

"Wrong. They're from people who think every window manager should act consistently. This is decades of UI design and expected behavior being flushed down the toilet by a company for which NIH is religious dogma. That Windows behaves the correct, expected way is an indictment on OS X, not its growing base of increasingly frustrated power users."

I don't see how that couldn't be turned entirely on its head? Windows is clearly the one ignoring the decades of UI design and expected behaviour from Apple, as from checking from screenshots, has been since at least System 3 — predating Windows 3.1. ;-)

Though, I agree that Apple seem intent in ridding themselves of powerusers and developers, which seems like a somewhat perverse set of incentives.

I did not know that, that's useful thank you.

I still stick to my guns: the default behavior is insane. Focusing on one task (ie: one screen, window, app etc) at a time is the common use case, when I want to show two screens at once it's the exception. Current behavior is based on a philosophical concept of carrying through the "desktop" metaphor, and SJ's obsession with showing off his stacked windows, which mac was first to have, rather than on how humans actually want to use computers.