Like many people, I use a third-party mouse with extra buttons on macOS. I enjoy the gestures available on the Magic Mouse, but it isn’t an ideal mouse for precision work. The extra buttons of the third-party mouse are a great productivity boost. For instance I’ve set the scroll wheel button press to bring up Mission Control1, and use this constantly.

Support for the back and forward buttons should be pervasive. We’re about two decades past this being a known benefit. Some apps just automatically utilize these extra mouse buttons, for instance Microsoft Edge, but Safari explicitly does not. Safari stubbornly does not. It’s obnoxious.

A similar daily annoyance is the lack of system volume controls for individual apps. Sure apps that emit audio often have their own volume control, but there are many cases where they simply don’t and you want to reign them in at the system level without having to decrease your master volume. macOS has no such facility.

For both of these cases, and for many similar little itches, there are third party apps to hack in the ability. I don’t want to have to trust or use sometimes dodgy third party apps for simple things like this. For instance background-music can be used to individually control the volume of apps, but it’s so overwrought and has such ugly edges it’s not something I want running normally.

They’re big oversights and it’s absurd this continues to be a problem.

Footnotes

  1. Before some recent updates I would have to reconfigure this shortcut in Keyboard & Mouse Shortcuts on every restart, but recently it actually was fixed and retains it. ↩