Full Screen (Premium)

Switching regularly between the Mac and Windows 11 over the past few weeks, I'm struck by a familiar juxtaposition. I love the Mac's full-screen mode, and how well it works with touchpad gestures, but it integrates awkwardly with apps that aren't running full-screen and works inconsistently with the system's other multitasking features. And I very much prefer the logical and efficient multitasking features in Windows 11 though there's no true full-screen mode per se, and the touchpad gestures are at the mercy of hardware quality.

Previous to macOS Tahoe, I would use a handful of free and paid utilities to fix some of the major issues with multitasking on that platform. But after clean installing macOS Tahoe recently, I confirmed that even the latest version of macOS doesn't solve one curious inconsistency with full-screen apps: Yes, the menu bar is transparent by default now, but when you hide it, it still leaves behind an empty black bar in its place. Full-screen apps on the Mac are never really full-screen.

But I discovered something else while testing macOS in this configuration: I miss seeing the time display. This is one of those things you don't think about explicitly until it's not available anymore. And each time I hid the macOS menu bar, I ended up re-displaying it. I can pretty much live with it being hidden otherwise--you can display it by mousing up to the top edge of the screen--but I always miss seeing the time, go figure.

Windows implemented a true full-screen mode for Windows 8, and it was nice for staying focused. But the Metro apps and Start screen that were exclusive to it proved unpopular. And so Microsoft moved back to a more traditional desktop-style interface with floating and full-screen app windows instead.

Today in Windows 11, you can hide the Taskbar, but that's about as close as we get to a universal full-screen mode on the platform: With this change, any maximized app literally does display using the entire screen. And a few apps, mostly web browsers, do support a true full-screen mode that's usually toggled by typing Alt + F11. And because this is Windows, you can Alt + Tab between any open apps and windows, regardless of them being full-screen, maximized, or floating windows. This works consistently, and it's a nice advantage over the Mac.

Windows also supports the same basic touchpad gestures as the Mac, so you can do things like swipe three fingers left and right to switch between apps (windows), swipe three fingers up to view all available windows (Task view), and swipe three fingers down to view the desktop. The problem here is that I often have to disable three finger touchpad gestures in Windows because most PC laptops have inferior touchpads that don't work as well as is the case with the Mac. That's a shame, but at least Alt + Tab still works properly.

When you hide the Taskbar, you also hide the time/date display in the system tray. And so I have the same issue as I do on the Mac: I...