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.

And finally Bluetooth and audio devices. When bluetooth connects it has a variety of protocol/profile options at vastly varying levels of quality. If it uses a profile that uses the microphone on a headset — and sadly almost every headset has a microphone now, which is unfortunate given this problem — it will use a terrible quality profile for output audio (HSP/HFP), prioritizing high quality recording of the microphone and dropping the audio to a low bitrate, mono mess. If a single app on your system asks for audio input, even optionally, bluetooth headsets will fall to this AM-radio quality level audio output.

All I want for Christmas is to be able to configure the headset to not use the microphone, and to never ever fall to HSP/HFP. There is no such facility. Buy airpods that have their own solution is the fix, I guess.

For each of these missing features, 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. ↩