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Mavericks resizes application windows and moves them around

This problem has started since I installed Mavericks. Typically I have Firefox and Outlook loaded most of the time, occasionally other applications such as Spotify. My wife also has an account on the iMac, so she logs in, leaving me logged in. When I switch back to my account, the applications have resized themselves to odd small sizes, and Outlook is sometimes half-way off-screen and can't be moved (if I drag it back on-screen it just snaps back to the off-screen position).


I have found a way to prevent this, and this is to ensure my wife minimises the applications first. Strangely none of her applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, iTunes) move or resize.


Certainly a bug that's arrived with Mavericks, so Apple if you're reading this please fix it.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Nov 2, 2013 3:25 AM

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156 replies

Feb 23, 2014 8:48 AM in response to alessandrofrommilano

alessandrofrommilano wrote:


I don't know what you people think about this issue. In my humble opinion there is simply NO WAY a serious company would leave its software with a bug this bad (I guess everybody who works with his/her Mac and is experiencing this bug couldn't agree more) for more than 4 months. This logically implies that Apple is no longer a serious company, at least in the computer field. I honestly can't believe that I have to deal with this problem at least 4/5 times per day (on average), and I will seriously take it into account when I will buy my next piece of hardware - because in my field I'm quite free to choose the OS I prefer.


The fact that Mavericks has been distributed for free is all but an excuse, and it seems like the software support has been left in the users' own hands.


I am really, really, really disappointed.


Sure it's an annoying bug, but it is cosmetic -- no data loss, and quick to workaround. Anyway, good luck in finding an OS without bugs.

Feb 23, 2014 9:40 AM in response to Tom Robinson5

I don't completely agree: before knowing some workarounds (like changing the dock position), I was forced to close the window with cmd+Q; depending on the app this could lead to some data loss.


Of course no OS is without bugs, but I must admit this is one of the most annoying I came across (and I have been intensively using OSX, Windows and a number of Linux distros for years)!

Feb 23, 2014 10:16 AM in response to CamberleyDaz

I will just chime on that, that I can see both sides of that argument.


As common as the bug is, it should have been fixed within a month. It shouldn't be a quarter or a half year to iron stuff out like that.


And, yes, one can work around it, but the first time it happened to me, right after upgrading to Mavericks, and I had two critically important documents open, and couldn't get to them, wasn't sure I could depend on auto-save or auto-recovery ... my gut reaction was "oh snit", but I invisibly alt-tabbed to it and hit command+s to the one I knew I had not manually saved, then started to see if I could get to it through other ways.


Once you know you can do it via a screen resolution switch, it is not a big deal.

But the average user isn't even going to know that the app is minimized off screen and figure out that switching resolutions triggers a recentering of active windows. People are getting more computer savvy all the time, but not everybody is a geek, techy, support guru, it professional used to brainstorm through such things rapidly.


So, while it may be "cosmetic" to some, data loss is not ... which pushes me to say this is a serious bug.


Maybe not as critical as various firmware issues, SODs, kernel panics ... but important nonetheless.

Feb 23, 2014 7:45 PM in response to icerabbit

Well ... I've run into a number of problems that have "bumped-up" to the senior techs ... and then to the "S/W Engineers" for fixes. One of them being Quicktime. I've watched this session, with interest, but I can say that I've NOT encountered this ongoing issue. Nice to know 10.9.2 is on its way. Hope this also fixes the "Finder" issues with runaway Safari and QT problems! :-)

Jun 16, 2014 6:32 PM in response to J Cobb

10.9.2 fixed the problem on my iMac.


But the problem returned, sort of, on 10.9.3. The actions that created the problem in 10.9.2 do it again in 10.9.3, but now the windows aren't permanentsly stuck to the menu bar and I'm not sure they are resized.


But 10.9.3 does move windows to the top left corner as 10.9.2 did. At least they aren't stuck and resized down to uselessness.

Jun 20, 2014 11:19 AM in response to CamberleyDaz

I've had similar difficulties to those posted here, and on some of the other discussions. In my case, I'm working with a new 2013 iMac (3.5 GHz i7 27" running OS X 10.9.3) with two older monitors connected by Dual Link Thunderbolt to DVI adapters. When waking from sleep, I find that all of my application windows have been recalled to the main iMac screen - sometimes. Sometimes the windows on the outlying monitors have just been resized, but still stay on the non-mirrored monitors. One symptom I haven't read about, when I press "command" "tab" to change applications, my floating doc of running applications changes from my iMac display to one of the other monitors - or not. I have to look around to find it.


At any rate, I've reported it to Apple but still trying to figure it out. Haven't tried the restart in Safe Mode fix yet.

Mavericks resizes application windows and moves them around

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