Comments about Linux/Ubuntu from a former MS-programmer

[Lee Revell]

On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 01:48 +1000, Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:
> Oh, that's what you meant. i thought you meant the buttons
> disappearing. In Gnome you definitely cannot resize a maximised window
> without restoring it too its original size first.
> 

I don't know of any reasearch on the topic but I suspect usability
studies would show that the majority of users maximize whatever windows
they are using and leave them that way.  Witness the recent redesign of
the nytimes.com site, that assumes browsing maximized at 1024x768 or
better.  Judging from the comments I read on various blogs about it,
browsing un-maximized is considered a corner case.

Apple must have had a reason to change this behavior between OS9 and
OSX.  I think it's just easier on the eyes to have the part of the
screen I'm not using be filled empty space, rather than a slice of my
quite busy and distracting desktop icons, or a random chunk of another
window.  Maybe this will change when 40 inch monitors become common.

Lee