macOS 27 is so buggy

Some of the frustration expressed by users is due to the unexpected nature of performance bugs like this, particularly because MacOS 27 Golden Gate has so many other examples of performance improvements, and general improvements to other features, like Spotlight and general search. These users often report that Mission Control and Stage Manager were fluid and responsive in earlier versions of MacOS, but feel it has degraded in MacOS 27 Golden Gate. Whether or not these complaints are due to the standard background activity that runs post-OS update is unclear.

For me personally, I have noticed in some heavy usage situations that Mission Control and Stage Manager can both be peculiarly laggy if there are many apps and browser windows open, but especially if any of those windows or apps have a video or multimedia playing. For example, leaving iMessage open with an animated gif and animated message background, both seem to significantly impact performance (to be clear, this is not specific to Golden Gate and this slow Messages issue has been explored before, and GIFs and Stickers are often the culprit). By toggling “Reduce Transparency” on, there has been a notable improvement to speed and performance. Installing MacOS 27.0.1 did not seem to make any difference for me or others who report the sluggish performance of these window management features, but I would not be surprised if these type of performance issues were fixed in a future software update.

How widespread these Mission Control and Stage Manager performance issues are is not entirely clear, but there are a good number of complaints specifically about this on various Apple Discussion forums, Reddit threads, and HackerNews posts, suggesting a reasonable number of people are impacted.

Have you experienced any unusual performance issues, sluggishness, bugs, or other issues with Mission Control, Stage Manager, Spaces, and full screen apps, since installing MacOS 27 Golden Gate? Did the above tricks help you? Did you find another solution? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.