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.