Red green and yellow buttons

Question

Could someone explain how the three buttons in upper left corner are suppose to work.I know that the red is to close out the current page.The yellow is to minimize down to dock.but the green I thought was to either shrink page size to user preference and then when pressed again go to full size.Do you need to set both of these sizes? The other day I was on MLB.com and the next thing I know my screen became about half size then I hit the green button and it got slightly smaller.Up till that time I always had full sreen.Not quite sure why or the correct way to fix this.
Thanks ,
Bill

Answer 1

Network 23 wrote:
Niel wrote:
The green resizes the window to and from the minimum size the program thinks it needs to be
Apple has no consistent rule for the green button; it isn't worth trying to figure it out. In Safari and others, it will resize to content. In TextEdit, Mail, and others, it will maximize to full screen. In iTunes 9 and earlier, it will change the window mode. In iTunes 10, the green button is gray...
Except for iTunes, it is consistent. But, you have to understand the concept and what is being displayed. The Zoom button toggles between a user state and the smallest size which will hold all of the content of the window. In Text Edit, there is no wrapping. A line of text will stretch across the entire screen. So, if you Zoom to the content state, the window will fill the screen. If you tell TE to wrap to page, the zoom width will be only page width, not full screen. Mail is similar in that there are no line breaks in a message, so the smallest size is the full screen. I can't defend iTunes and the debacle that is it's Zoom button.
I think the observation of the red button is correct; if an app has one window it quits, if it has multiple windows the window closes but the app stays open.
The Close button closes the document window. In accordance with the user interface guidelines, if the App has no reason to stay open without a document window, the app can close if the last document window is closed. Utilities will often do this. A Document editor will likely not close the app as it is much faster (with very little resource overhead) to keep the app open waiting until the user begins a new document.
Also realize that these are not System defined behaviors. They are listed in the User Interface Guidelines, but it is up to the developer to implement the features to comply with the UIGs.