Why does PD 12 only support native fullscreen
- Thread starter CameronA
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James_Toothman
Bit poster
The MacOS native full screen mode and "Spaces" is one of the worst features of MacOS. Applications like Parallels unfortunately *need* a custom full-screen mode to be usable, IMO. The constant switching I do between applications (ex: via CMD-TAB, or CMD-H) becomes too tedious without.
I've been a Parallels user since v2.x and yet I find myself using Parallels less and less because of this tedium ... I am strongly considering not renewing. I represent buying decisions for quite a few licenses. I would rather go back to maintaining a separate laptop to run Windows.
Parallels needs to reconsider this decision if they want my continued subscription business. I hate this change that much!!
I've been a Parallels user since v2.x and yet I find myself using Parallels less and less because of this tedium ... I am strongly considering not renewing. I represent buying decisions for quite a few licenses. I would rather go back to maintaining a separate laptop to run Windows.
Parallels needs to reconsider this decision if they want my continued subscription business. I hate this change that much!!
I could not agree more with James. Parallels is seriously underestimating the impact of this decision, and while I appreciate their reasoning behind it, I believe putting up with a few quirks caused by emulated full screen is far better than completely eliminating it. At the least Parallels should, if they haven't already, be pushing hard on Apple to provide a better native fullscreen mode, or allow developers more control over how full screen applications are mapped to each monitor, etc.
I'm now using VMware Fusion, but I look forward to the day parallels can once again be used on a multi-monitor setup.
I'm now using VMware Fusion, but I look forward to the day parallels can once again be used on a multi-monitor setup.
The hilarious and actually sad part is, that they had it. The "fullscreen as a window" or whatever hack they used before as Dmitry explained it before Apple offered their crippled solution WORKED PERFECTLY FOR MANY OF US. Who cares about a couple of FPS lost in games or other negligible downsides of that mode. For actually getting WORK done with a fullscreen Win7 on the left and a fullscreen Mac OS on the right monitor it worked flawlessly whereas now it's slow to switch context, clumsy, drag-n-drop doesn't work any more across the OS's and many more downsides. I'm currently running a completely crippled setup where the win7 is in a window on the left monitor. Yes, with the nasty grey bar on top that also can't be turned off! Even if it would just be possible to get rid of that bar, I would happily just manyally "resize" my VM to full screen and be happy. My setup runs 24/7, so I don't need to change much or reboot often. Still, the ignorance and aversion towards the customers' requests to bring back the multi monitor full screen is baffling!
I must admit I use only one monitor mostly, but the issue of switching from MacOS to VM drives me crazy now, after all the years it worked fine. Just as I can understand, that enabling the native MacOS fullscreen has its reasons, I also completely don't understand why the "emulated" fullscreen had to be removed altogether. Let the users make their own choice.
I wish Parallels would come clean with the ACTUAL reason why they removed it (maybe it was too hard to maintain?...) instead of stonewalling us and coming up with lame excuses. CAD issues I can understand. Game performance? Really??? I would seriously be interested in how many users are using Parallels to play games on Windows instead of work related stuff. I imagine 1% is an optimistic figure.
I used a sale to upgrade to 12, also immediately regretting it. And joined the forum only to complain about this, as I suspect many people in this thread did (judging by their messages count). How much more evidence does Parallels need to understand this is seriously bumming people out?
I wish Parallels would come clean with the ACTUAL reason why they removed it (maybe it was too hard to maintain?...) instead of stonewalling us and coming up with lame excuses. CAD issues I can understand. Game performance? Really??? I would seriously be interested in how many users are using Parallels to play games on Windows instead of work related stuff. I imagine 1% is an optimistic figure.
I used a sale to upgrade to 12, also immediately regretting it. And joined the forum only to complain about this, as I suspect many people in this thread did (judging by their messages count). How much more evidence does Parallels need to understand this is seriously bumming people out?
I even filed a support case (because, you know, you can only open so many despite paying for the product!) and it was a total waste of one shot. They just brushed me off with a link to the "KB" describing how to turn the OS X internal full screen feature on. After that, I didn't get any more responses other than "my input will be forwarded" which is coming up ON A YEAR NOW that this has been broken and crippled and for some reason whenever I downgrade to PD11, it runs for like 2-3 days, then just keeps crashing the whole iMac so bad that only a hard reset will bring it back to life each time. Very frustrating.
Just received the new update 12.2.1 (41615). Sadly still no sign of the fullscreen feature coming back. It really looks like Parallels has abandoned us professional multi screen users for good and is intentionally ignoring all the user input. What really sucks most about this is that I've gotten "too used" to my dual setup with Mac and Windows and it's going to be hard to figure out a way to either fix it by switching to VMware or abandon the whole VM idea and just switch to either Windows or MacOS completely.
BIG WARNING to everyone using full screen multi monitor setups! DO NOT UPGRADE TO HIGH SIERRA YET !!!!!
PD13 is completely out of control buggy. It has become close to unusable at this point and will force me to find an alternative here within the month. Unfortunately I am dependent on a Win7/Mac side by side setup for my work and after years of using parallels to do this perfectly on one iMac, I will now have to invest a lot of time which I don't have to alter my setup.
PD13 is completely out of control buggy. It has become close to unusable at this point and will force me to find an alternative here within the month. Unfortunately I am dependent on a Win7/Mac side by side setup for my work and after years of using parallels to do this perfectly on one iMac, I will now have to invest a lot of time which I don't have to alter my setup.
Dmitry Geynisman
Parallels Team
Hi Stefan, is it possible for our senior technician to access your Mac remotely so you can show us the issues you mention: "it's slow to switch context, clumsy, drag-n-drop doesn't work any more across the OS's and many more downsides."? This should work okay in multimonitor Full Screen regardless the version (11, 12 or 13).
Hello Dmitry! Thanks for taking note of this thread. I would be more than happy to have a tech look for themselves. I also shot a quick video for you to immediately see the problem. Whenever you work on the Mac side and then want to do anything inside the fullscreen VM, there is a massive context switching delay.
For example (shown in the video) moving a window or double clicking a file. The first double click is completely ignored. It takes a second try to open the file.
Just FYI, all this was never an issue with the way it used to be in PD11. If you just treat the whole VM as a "borderless window" and fill one monitor with it, then that really is the best behavior you can get for someone with more than one monitor who wants the second (or third) monitor basically be a "virtual standalone PC" without the PC tower!
Dmitry Geynisman
Parallels Team
Thank you very much, Stefan. Сan you please send us a technical report generated right after reproducing this behavior? Via Help menu > Send Technical Data...
Please post the report ID here.
Absolutely. Here is the number: 219979175
Please remember that I was asked to do this before and nothing came from it. While it would definitely be important to get rid of the switching lag (VMWare doesn't have that), just fixing the lag would not get rid of all the other problems and inconveniences like:
- Can't access the VM context menu bar any more. It is greyed out on the Mac side and when trying to click something like "Devices" for example, it immediately disappears.
- Accidentally touching the bottom of the screen with the mouse bringing the Mac Dock up over the top of Windows (super annoying)
- Not being able to run an iMac with 2 ext monitors and have Windows on ONE of them while sharing a regular dual setup on the Mac (due to the crippling "Monitors have separate spaces" setting being ON) !!
- Hot corners not working at all currently on the windows full screen monitor. There is no way to quickly connect or disconnect a USB drive because you can't get to the "Devices" Menu
Please remember that I was asked to do this before and nothing came from it. While it would definitely be important to get rid of the switching lag (VMWare doesn't have that), just fixing the lag would not get rid of all the other problems and inconveniences like:
- Can't access the VM context menu bar any more. It is greyed out on the Mac side and when trying to click something like "Devices" for example, it immediately disappears.
- Accidentally touching the bottom of the screen with the mouse bringing the Mac Dock up over the top of Windows (super annoying)
- Not being able to run an iMac with 2 ext monitors and have Windows on ONE of them while sharing a regular dual setup on the Mac (due to the crippling "Monitors have separate spaces" setting being ON) !!
- Hot corners not working at all currently on the windows full screen monitor. There is no way to quickly connect or disconnect a USB drive because you can't get to the "Devices" Menu
Latest version 13.1.1 this bug here is still present:
Easy steps to reproduce: Run a VM in fullscreen mode, DO NOT activate "separate spaces" for fullscreen
Activate "optimize full screen for games" in Parallels settings for the VM.
Swipe left from the fullscreen VM back to Mac OS only to find the VM glitching on top of the Mac screen. Just as shown in the video.
Easy steps to reproduce: Run a VM in fullscreen mode, DO NOT activate "separate spaces" for fullscreen
Activate "optimize full screen for games" in Parallels settings for the VM.
Swipe left from the fullscreen VM back to Mac OS only to find the VM glitching on top of the Mac screen. Just as shown in the video.
I just made the mistake of "upgrading" from Parallels 11 to Parallels 13. I did not realize that the choice to emulate fullscreen (i.e. NOT use Apple's stupid native fullscreen) had been removed. I use a single monitor and assign shortcuts to each screen. With native fullscreen my Windows VM gets shoved to a new space without a shortcut and there's no good way to reach it directly from other spaces. I switch too often to have to constantly show Mission Control and click the last space.
I tried making a 12th space, assigning it a shortcut, then deleting it. The idea being that when a VM opens and goes full screen it will be the 12th space and maybe the shortcut would still be good. No good as the shortcut is deleted as well.
I even tried making a 12th space and assigning a shortcut, then swapping space 13 (with Parallels in FS) so it becomes 12, but the shortcut is tied to the original space no matter where you move it. It's not tied to the numerical position.
Adding insult to injury, Apple has yet to provide a public API for controlling Mission Control. So there is no way for me to programmatically intercept a shortcut and then move to the last space, whatever it might be.
I will cancel my "pro" subscription and may even demand a refund. (If Parallels refuses my bank will be happy to reverse the charge any way.)
Stupid, stupid, STUPID move on Parallels part.
I tried making a 12th space, assigning it a shortcut, then deleting it. The idea being that when a VM opens and goes full screen it will be the 12th space and maybe the shortcut would still be good. No good as the shortcut is deleted as well.
I even tried making a 12th space and assigning a shortcut, then swapping space 13 (with Parallels in FS) so it becomes 12, but the shortcut is tied to the original space no matter where you move it. It's not tied to the numerical position.
Adding insult to injury, Apple has yet to provide a public API for controlling Mission Control. So there is no way for me to programmatically intercept a shortcut and then move to the last space, whatever it might be.
I will cancel my "pro" subscription and may even demand a refund. (If Parallels refuses my bank will be happy to reverse the charge any way.)
Stupid, stupid, STUPID move on Parallels part.
Christian Walther
Bit poster
I recently planned to update from PD 11 to 13, but was lucky enough to install it as a trial before I bought the update, so I noticed soon enough that this feature removal made it completely unusable in my situation. I opened a support ticket and after some unhelpful back-and-forth finally got a support engineer who understood what I wanted and "forwarded your feature request to the Product Management Team for their consideration". I hope if enough affected people do that (or at least vote for the feature request), we will get the emulated fullscreen mode back in some future version, so that I can update before OS updates break my PD 11.
Anyway, that's not why I'm writing. I am writing because I have discovered a weird workaround for my situation that makes it halfway bearable (but I will still revert to PD 11, which is not just bearable but working fine). It is so strange that I suspect it is based on some bug, and may or may not work for you, but I wanted to throw it out there in case it helps anyone. It may be dependent on my macOS version, 10.12.6, my Parallels Desktop version, 13.3.2, or any other kind of random circumstance.
Anyway, that's not why I'm writing. I am writing because I have discovered a weird workaround for my situation that makes it halfway bearable (but I will still revert to PD 11, which is not just bearable but working fine). It is so strange that I suspect it is based on some bug, and may or may not work for you, but I wanted to throw it out there in case it helps anyone. It may be dependent on my macOS version, 10.12.6, my Parallels Desktop version, 13.3.2, or any other kind of random circumstance.
- I have a three-monitor setup (1 center, 2 right, 3 left) and three (non-fullscreen) spaces, low-res (non-retina) monitors.
- My desired outcome, which was working perfectly in PD 11, is to have two spaces with a macOS desktop each spanning all three screens, and one with a Windows desktop spanning all three screens, and being able to switch between them quickly. I understand that this is a different situation than what some other people here want.
- "Displays have separate Spaces" in System Preferences is off.
- Settings for my Windows 10 VM are:
- Use all displays in full screen
- Activating virtual machine shows all its spaces (probably does not matter)
- Optimize full screen for games
- Use Windows gamma settings
- Scale to fit screen: Auto
- After starting the VM, I now have 8 spaces: my 3 regular ones plus 5 full-screen ones, each containing one Windows display on monitor 1, and black on monitor 2 and 3. (Why Windows thinks I have 5 displays instead of 3 I don't know, but I don't think it's relevant here. I just ignore the two extra ones that Windows tacked on at the left.)
- Switch to the space containing Windows display 2 (the one that should go on the right monitor) using ctrl + arrow keys.
- Point the mouse at the top of the screen (topmost pixel row) on the middle monitor (because of the "optimize for games" setting, this does not bring up the window title bar and menu bar) and click and drag. This allows you to drag the whole Windows display. Drag it onto the right monitor, it snaps in place to fill it.
- Do the same for Windows display 3 and the left monitor. You now have Windows displays 1, 2, and 3 on their proper monitor (the position is retained even when switching spaces), but still on different spaces.
- Go to the space containing Windows display 1 (the center one).
- Click inside the Windows display.
- Press ctrl + right arrow to go to the next space, the one containing Windows display 2. What then happens is, in a split second: 1. Monitor 3 stays black, on monitor 1 Windows display 1 shifts out to the left and is replaced by black shifting in from the right, and on monitor 2 black shifts out to the left and Windows display 2 shifts in from the right (this much is expected). 2. All monitors go black. 3. On all monitors, the respective Windows displays fade in. This is surprising but 100% reproducible for me, but only with the click into Windows display 1 before.
- Ta-dah! We now have the state we wanted: all Windows displays visible at the same time, on their proper monitors.
- Switching spaces again will destroy this arrangement. Restart at step "Go to the space..." to recreate it. The click is important.