I’ve found that clicking on the green ‘+’ button in the upper left hand corner of a window does not appear to have the same effect as on a PC. On the PC, doing so causes that window to go to full screen. On the Mac, it appears to only increase the window to the biggest size it needs to be, but does not go ‘full screen’ . Is there an easy way of quickly maximizing a window to use the whole page ? Its like reading a magazine article by opening it 1/4 open ? Or just pealed a corner at a time of a newspaper article instead of opening the whole page? . I cant have full focus on a particular thing i am doing ( like coding , surfing , text editing ) without having the window full sized. May be it is because i just came from windows world but Generally people need focus to what they are doing but in Mac how this can be achieved without having the active window full size.

Apple’s philosophy is that a maximized environment is inherently inefficent since it makes dragging content from one window to another cumbersome . Many types of documents are vertically oriented (like a printed page), yet monitors are wider than they are tall. So, for instance, it doesn’t make sense for a word processing document to fill the width of the screen.

The zoom button toggles its window between 2 states, the standard state and the user state. The standard state is determined by the application developer. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines provide this sensible direction to programmers for deciding the standard state of a window:

“Don’t assume that the standard state should be as large as possible; some monitors are much larger than the useful size for a window.”

Individual users determine the user state of their window by manually resizing it; the zoom button will then toggle between these two states.

Microsoft’s philosophy is that windows can be one of two sizes - a standard size (which can be resized), or maximized (filling the entire screen). If a user doesn’t like working with the standard size, the obvious solution is to make the window fill the entire screen so that you can see more content on the screen at once. Thus, all XP windows have a maximize button that toggles between these two states.

XP regards the last state that the window was in before it was closed as the preferred state. When you reopen a window, it will open back up to the state in which you left it. Maximized windows cannot be moved or resized. When you maximize a window, its maximize button turns into a “restore” button to return the window to its previous state.

Maximized windows have two main advantages:

• You cannot click outside of the maximized window, such as on the desktop or a background window (which makes it impossible for it to lose focus by an accidental click)
• Screen clutter is reduced because other open windows will be covered up by the maximized window

A detailed comparison of this is here .

For example here is a scenario which i particularly find most irritating . For a Finder window with lots of folders open when clicked on the green zoom button doesn’t increase the windows to the width i like . In that case i have to maximize the window from right bottom corner. After doing this also when i click green zoom button the window again goes back to the previous window size. To have this modified window size i have to arrange icons ( right click > arrange icons ) to fit the window size, then only the window size remains the same after i click the green zoom button . Though i did this on a specific finder window it  doesn’t work universally for all the finder windows. The Finder ( Explorer equivalent in windows ) will retain the size for that particular finder state only. So after doing all this of window resize and arrange icons if i go to another Folder the previous size i had applied doesn’t apply to the folder i just opened. This behavior of Mac Finder really annoys me.

You may read this about how many people dont like such behavior of window zoom in Mac .

There is an App which does the full screen job easier in Mac called MegaZoomer . For Megazoomer to work you will be needing SIMBL . SIMBL (Smart InputManager Bundle Loader) - pronounced like “symbol” or “cymbal” allows you to build hacks for Cocoa applications and apply the code selectively based on an application’s unique identifier. But sadly ,  megazoomer doesn’t work in Carbon applications (e.g., Finder, iTunes, Photoshop) .It Only works for Cocoa apps.

Below is the video of Mac Finder Zoom.