I'm still pissed at Apple for changing the default behavior of the green traffic light from Zoom to Full Screen. I never want to use Full Screen, and when they introduced it in Lion with a dedicated button I was content to ignore it. Even though I've developed muscle memory to hold down option every time I hit the green traffic light there's still times where I forget, let go early, etc. and I end up fullscreening the damned window instead and curse under my breath.
I never minded the application-specific Zoom behavior in macOS, in fact I find it much saner than Windows where you often end up with dead space inside an Application doing nothing. Safari pretty intelligently figures out the maximum horizontal width of a page before padding would be applied and resizes to that when zooming unless your window is already beyond that breakpoint, for example. Same thing with Word, for example. I don't want to see a bunch of dead space on my screen, I just want to show the maximum amount of content my application+display can show at once. (This is where I really dislike the change to the green traffic light, I don't want Window-like behavior on a Mac)
I never minded the application-specific Zoom behavior in macOS, in fact I find it much saner than Windows where you often end up with dead space inside an Application doing nothing. Safari pretty intelligently figures out the maximum horizontal width of a page before padding would be applied and resizes to that when zooming unless your window is already beyond that breakpoint, for example. Same thing with Word, for example. I don't want to see a bunch of dead space on my screen, I just want to show the maximum amount of content my application+display can show at once. (This is where I really dislike the change to the green traffic light, I don't want Window-like behavior on a Mac)