mission control thumbnails overlap so that I can't see them clearly

I have exact same problem. Mostly I do not have 4 or more applications open, so missioncontrol is just useless in this case. Literally impossible to pick the right application and window in this case. I have to click the icon of that application on the dock to make it active. I am shocked that such a major bug got out in an official release.

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to restate the problem more clearly. If you have few applications open, perhaps up to 3 (there can be many windows of each application open though, so you can have many windows of safari open). Then if you go to mission control, you should see a row of spaces at the top, and in the area below you should see three stack, one for each app and each stack will have all the windows of that particular application to choose from.

However, in this case all the windows from various applications do not form distinctive stacks and overlap each other, making it impossible to use mission control the way it is meant to. Does anyone know the solutions to this? At times I am keeping fake applications open just so mission control would work fine...

You don't happen to have ChangeDesktop installed?

I was seeing similar issues and it turned out to be a bug in this software, which I logged with the developer. There's a new beta available but not sure it entirely solves the problem.

Works for me even if i open seven applications,maybe if i have nine safari and nine finder windows it show only three in mision control but if i do expose for safari or finder within mision control i get spand to the nine windows may i can't see properly the the other seven or eight open apps but really i don't need that so i can concentrate in the nine in front of me,the idea i think is to have no a lot a lot apps open but have a nice view and totaly control of the ones you have open and of the windows from that apps and for the full screens app and dashboard and other desktops.I think is a good idea and the name is mission control and it just work..

Thank you for all your help. I do not have Change Desktop. However, if you guys dont have the same problem I wonder if some other software I have is causing this issue. I do not have a lot of third party software though so I hope I can figure it out. Just MS Office 2011, skype, adobe flash and flip4mac, and firefox/chrome.

Thebestplacehere: Actually my problem is that as soon as I launch mission control, all the 9 windows + 7 windows from various applications overlap each other on the screen and even overlap the spaces so you cannot see any window and do anything with them. As you can see in the image below, I have skype, finder, firefox and one other program open, but they all overlap and even crowd the spaces area at the top.

Hi,

I recently Installed Lion and found the same issue.

I then discovered that windows only overlap when one or more of the programmes are maximized to fill up the screen (in my case, which is maximized via the programme "Cinch"). When they all are restored by pressing the green button (the zoom button), they will be grouped back to their groups.

As I acknowlege it might be an issue due to Cinch, I uninstalled it and restarted the computer.

For the first time since the restart, overlapping still occurs, but soon after I press the zoom button, and resize them into the maximized window (without using Cinch, and apparently I've removed it), Wah-la, Mission Control is restored back to normal.

I wonder if any of you have installed Cinch. If yes, try to uninstall it. If not, see if you've got any incompatible software or Mods which have messed up the OS's ability in acknowledging the window size. I think it is a problem which the third party software has bypassed Mac's resizing function and therefore not being able to be recognized as maximized, thus overlapping others by their large thumbnail size.

Good luck!

i do have the same problem. after reading nafwerdnaz experience i tried it out...

open applications: finder (of course), safari, firefox

safari maximized:

safari just a litte bit smaller:

one more thing, if i open system preferences, it always works (with maximized safari):

this is really annoying!!!!

Thank you for Nafwerdnaz and Philipp80. I dont have cinch but it still happens. I did resize the windows and it worked but then I made a window even smaller and it stopped working again : )

I hope apple takes care of it, its definitely an annoying bug.

When you think it's a bug, please report to Apple.

They don't read the discussions...

I did a fresh Lion install this week and as soon as I resized my windows to maximum screen by stretching it again happened and I had not installed any third party apps. So I am more certain now that it is just a bug.

How do we report this to apple?

Okay, so I did installation again today to be sure. It seemed to happen only once but then never happened again. I have installed all the apps back except firefox. I hope firefox is not the culprit as I like using it 🙂

I am also having the same problem. However I do notice that when I open a fresh desktop and I view mission control from that desktop I can see all of the desktop thumbnails ok. However they fail to work when I 'slide' across to the other desktops... See the below images. Anyone know a fix?

I was able to fix my issue by opening terminal and typing

killall Dock