I have been trying out Mozilla Firefox lately, and so far, almost all the websites I frequent are compatible, YMMV. The tabbed browsing feature makes web browsing with a consistent window size an absolute breeze, I can't believe I've done web browsing any other way for so long! I will acknowledge that some web browsers will not browse all websites correctly, I find the same thing with windows based browsers as well, IE included.

In terms of being able to maximize a window, you already know about the green button on the top left of each window. The reason why it does not duplicate the maximize button in windows is quite simple: The mac user interface from day one allows one to have many windows open on the desktop at the same time, so what's the sense of having one window take over the entire desktop? Maybe twisted thinking from your point of view, but it makes sense to me. I have always hated the maximize button on my windows desktops!

I think the bottom line is you're trying to make a Mac work like Windows...it simply won't! They are decidedly different GUI's, with some similarities. I use both for my work, but look forward to the day that everything can be done on my PowerBook. I recommend to all my friends making the windows to mac transition a healthy reading of David Pogue's excellent book "Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual" it will make it a lot easier, sorry, my copy is already lent out to a good friend! After reading it, the "Mac" way of doing things makes more sense to those who have been windows users for a long time and are frustrated with their Mac.

You might want to take a look at www.versiontracker.com and maybe find a free (or cheap) utility that will enhance the functionality of the mac desktop. I just did a search under OS X for the word "desktop" and came up with 11 pages worth of downloads, and 5 pages worth of downloads for the word "finder." Perhaps you might find a cool utility that will make panther behave the way you want it to?