A Mission Control alternative for Mac

No. A browser window with twenty tabs is one window there, the same as everywhere else in macOS. Here, every tab in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi and Opera is a card of its own, and tabs stack into one pile per window, so twenty of them take about four slots on screen instead of twenty. Type to filter them by website, not just by title.

Yes. It ships with every Mac, needs no download and no permissions, and opens with a trackpad gesture that is already in your hands, the same gesture whether the Mac is brand new or ten years old. Better Window Switcher is a separate paid app on top of that, built for search, browser tabs, and seeing every desktop in one view rather than one at a time.

Apple has never stated this either way. What is certain is that minimized windows sit in the Dock rather than in the Mission Control layout itself, since Apple's own description covers only the windows open on your current desktop. Better Window Switcher shows every minimized and hidden window as a card alongside everything else, on every desktop at once, so nothing you set aside is ever out of reach.

No. Mission Control has no search or filtering of any kind, and Apple documents no keyboard way to choose a window once you are inside it, only shortcuts to enter and leave. Better Window Switcher opens on one keystroke and searches windows and browser tabs by name as you type, matching the app, the title, or the website behind a tab.

Not directly. Apple's own description places other Spaces and full screen apps as thumbnails in the Spaces bar, so you see the space itself rather than the individual windows inside it. Better Window Switcher lists every window from every desktop together, as its own card, in the same view, so you never have to remember which desktop a window was left open on.

Only partly. Apple documents Control-Up to enter Mission Control, Control-Down for App Exposé, and Control-Left and Control-Right to move between desktops, but no keyboard shortcut to select a specific window once the layout is open. Choosing a window there is a trackpad or mouse action, which is exactly the gap this app is built to close, from summon to a focused window without lifting a hand from the keys.

Because it comes from a different tradition. Better Window Switcher is built in the spirit of Compiz and Beryl, the Linux desktops that turned switching into a 3D scene you orbit, years before Mission Control existed in its current form. Orbiting a scene is simply a different way of recognizing a window than scanning a flat layer of thumbnails, and it is the part of the app most people notice first.

Yes. Every feature is unlocked for seven days with no account and no card, so you can keep Mission Control for arranging your desktops and still see whether searching and orbiting your windows is worth a shortcut of its own. There is a 14 day money back guarantee after that, and one payment of 19.99 USD covers two Macs with nothing recurring afterwards.