OS X Yosemite: The Missing Manual

Mission Control: Death to Window Clutter

In its day, the concept of overlapping windows on the screen was brilliant, innovative, and extremely effective. (Apple borrowed this idea—well, bought it in a stock swap—from a research lab called Xerox PARC.) In that era before digital cameras, MP3 files, and the Web, managing windows was easy this way; after all, you had only about three of them.

These days, however, managing all the open windows in all the open programs can be like herding cats. Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your Dock, trying to find the window you want. And heaven help you if you need to duck back to the desktop—to find a newly downloaded file, for example, or to eject a disk. You’ll have to fight your way through 50,000 other windows on your way to the bottom of the “deck.”

Figure 5-8. Top: So much for the glorious Web. You’re seeing a Web page segment, swimming in an ocean of toolbars, scroll bars, status bars, menu bars, and distracting desktop. Bottom: In Full Screen mode, Safari stretches to the very edges of your screen, and everything else disappears. (Your address bar and tab bars are still available in this case.) Each Full Screen app becomes its own desktop in Mission Control. And you can put a Full Screen app on each of your monitors, too. To leave Full Screen mode, move your cursor to the top of the screen so that the menu bar ...