Over a decade a go I wrote why windows' taskbar beats osx' dock. In the intervening years I've gotten pretty used to the Mac Dock, (using SizeUp for awesome and intuitive keyboard based window management, and then HyperSwitch to fix the DUMBEST thing in MacOS, because switching to an application with no windows open should open a default window when you switch to it with cmd-` just like it does if you click on its icon in the dock) but just recently I realized there's an app called uBar that lets Mac have a very Windows 95-y/XP-ish button bar.
You can set it with window titles ala Windows 95, or just icons, and with our without the "grouping by app" that later Windows copied from Mac.
Conceptually I like it. I've gotten used to App, then Window thinking that Mac encourages, but honestly I leave a LOT of windows, especially browser windows, just hanging out. (Combine that with how both the Mac and browser assume I want to reopen everything whenever possible, which honestly is totally missing the point of restart/reboots, and it's significantly annoying) Seeing a button or icon for each window helped me keep things neat.
There were enough small annoyance (some programs used wonky icons or would open up a gratuitous second uBar icon even if only one window was visible) that I probably won't stick with, but I found it cleaner and more straight forward than Ventura's Stage Manager. One icon per window still makes a lot of sense. (I guess in the mean while I'll try to remember to ctrl-down-arrow a lot to see how many windows I have lying around, and then cmd-w to close so they won't try and reopen en masse)
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