Thank you for giving me the opportunity to rant about something: I would use Dock autohiding if it worked properly. Unfortunately, it does not, so I keep it always visible, wasting precious space on my screen in the process.
The problem with Dock autohiding is that if I accidentally touch the bottom edge of my screen with my mouse for even one moment, the Dock unhides, covering up whatever content was already there. This is annoying.
It is possible to add a delay before the Dock unhides, but then it takes longer to access the Dock.
Now, you might say this is just an inherent tradeoff between ease of use and screen real estate. But Apple themselves came up with a better solution!
Open an app and click the green traffic light icon to enter full screen. The Dock hides! Now, move your mouse just to the bottom edge of your screen. The Dock... will still be hidden! To unhide the Dock, you have to keep moving your mouse down past the bottom edge of the screen, and the Dock will unhide!
It's genius! I love it! The Dock has worked this way in full screen mode ever since full screen was added in OS X Lion. But for some reason, if you enable Dock autohiding outside of full screen mode, it continues to work the old and stupid way.
Why? No clue! It used to be that every year when Apple released an OS X update, I would check to see if they'd fixed this, and made Dock autohiding work the same way both inside and outside of full screen mode. After a decade, I finally gave up hope.
Leave it to Apple to take a seemingly-intractable UI problem, come up with a brilliant solution for the problem, and then not use it. Sigh.
