Running TFT and a stats site side by side on a Mac

Stats site on one side, game on the other. On a Windows machine with two monitors, nobody thinks twice about it. On a Mac, the first attempt tends to end the same way: the game jumps to full screen, the browser disappears behind it, and every switch slides the whole display sideways like a conveyor belt. Nothing is broken, and your Mac is not the problem. macOS full screen simply does not behave like the Windows version. One thing worth stating up front, because it changes what we are even talking about: since patch 18.1, macOS is no longer supported by Teamfight Tactics. The game in this article runs inside OSFT Launcher, which you set up with our step by step install guide, and it behaves like any other app window, so everything below applies to it.

macOS full screen is not Windows maximise

On Windows, a maximised window is still a window: something else can sit on top of it, or beside it. On macOS, the green button does something else entirely. It moves the window into a desktop of its own, a Space, where nothing else is allowed to appear. That is perfect for writing and exactly wrong for reading a page during the planning phase. Four behaviours to tell apart, because your setup is a choice between them.

• Full screen (click the green button): the window gets its own desktop. No other window can appear over it, and switching to the browser scrolls the entire display.
• Zoomed window (hold Option, then click the green button): the window fills the available space but stays on the normal desktop, where another app can sit next to it or on top. This is the mode you want.
• Split View: two apps share one Space, divided by a bar you can drag. Comfortable on a large display, cramped on a 13 inch laptop.
• Stage Manager: it tucks inactive windows to the side automatically. Great for office work, actively annoying here, because it hides the browser the moment you click into the game.

So the layout that survives a full lobby starts by giving up strict full screen. You lose a few pixels of window chrome and gain a browser that stays where you put it.

One display: two thirds game, one third stats

Splitting the screen down the middle feels fair and turns out to be the wrong call. The TFT board loses a lot when it shrinks, while a stats page reads perfectly well in a narrow column: it is text and tables, not a 3D scene. Two thirds for the game and one third for the browser is the ratio that forgives the most on a laptop panel.

1. 1Put the launcher into a zoomed window instead of full screen: hold Option and click the green button.
2. 2Open the browser, drag it down to roughly a third of the screen width, and park it on the opposite side from your mouse hand so you do not hover it by accident.
3. 3Use page zoom (Command and the plus or minus keys) rather than a wider window. A stats page at 80 percent is still perfectly readable and hands a good strip of width back to the game.
4. 4Pin the tab for the site you use. It reopens in the same place every session, with no trip through your history.
5. 5Turn Stage Manager off for the session in Control Centre. It is what makes the browser vanish on your first click into the game.

The real trap: the keyboard follows the click, not your eyes

This is the part nobody sees coming. You finally have both windows side by side, you click the stats page to scroll it, you look back at the board, you press D to reroll and nothing happens. That is expected: on macOS the click hands keyboard focus to whatever you clicked, so your keystrokes now go to the browser. The TFT shortcuts covered in our Mac keyboard controls guide only reach the game while its window is frontmost.

• Scrolling does not need focus. On macOS the trackpad and the wheel act on whatever window the pointer is hovering, so you can scroll a stats page without ever clicking it and keep the keyboard pointed at the game.
• If you did click, click a neutral area of the board to hand focus back. Avoid clicking a unit to do it, or you will pick the unit up on the way.
• Command and Tab bring the game forward without touching the mouse, which is quicker when the pointer is still parked over the browser.
• Browser shortcuts overlap yours more often than you think: a stats page that treats the space bar as page down will happily do that while you thought you were talking to the game.

Two monitors, or an iPad over Sidecar

With an external display the whole problem softens: the game owns one screen, the stats own the other, and the question of splitting width disappears. One macOS setting decides whether it works at all, and most people have never seen it.

• System Settings, Desktop and Dock, the option called Displays have separate Spaces. Switched on, the game can go full screen on one monitor while the other stays usable. Switched off, going full screen blanks the second monitor into a useless grey field.
• Pick which display carries the menu bar in System Settings, Displays, by dragging the white bar in the diagram. That is the one macOS treats as primary, and it is where many windows open by default.
• Sidecar turns an iPad into a second display with no cable. That is more than enough for a stats page propped next to the keyboard, and it saves buying a monitor for three tables.
• An external monitor makes the GPU work harder, especially at high resolution. On battery, your runtime notices, as we covered in our piece on Mac battery life during a game.

What is actually worth looking at mid game

A second screen is useless if you fill it with the wrong page. A TFT round gives you roughly half a minute of planning between fights: that is short for reading, and very short for reading and positioning. Sorting what belongs in a live window from what belongs to your post game review matters more than any window setting.

• Live and useful: the item table and its components, trait breakpoints for the set, the unit list by cost. Two second lookups that change a decision you are making right now.
• Live and useless: the seven day top four rate of a comp. That is preparation data, not in game data.
• Between games: match history, rank graph, comparing your own boards. Take your time there, and prefer a method to a list of comps, the way we set it out in our guide to learning a new set.
• Never: a long guide article open during the carousel. Reading time is time you are not spending on choices, and the carousel does not wait for you.

Worth saying plainly: these sites live in a browser next to the game. Nothing is layered on top of the game and nothing touches it, it is a second window open on your Mac, the way a spreadsheet sits next to a document.

What the second window costs in performance

A browser is not free. A stats page that refreshes on its own, three forgotten tabs and a video playing in the background all want CPU time while the game wants its share. On a MacBook Air, with no fan to help, that bill eventually shows up: the machine warms, it slows itself down, and the game loses frames although you changed nothing in its settings. Close the tabs that have nothing to do with the lobby, and remember that when a game turns choppy the culprit is more often rendering than the network, which is where our guide to TFT lag on Mac starts.

The whole setup in five minutes

1. 1Start a game, then leave strict full screen: hold Option and click the green button for a zoomed window.
2. 2Open the browser on your stats page, pin the tab, size the window to a third of the screen and adjust page zoom rather than width.
3. 3Turn Stage Manager off, and check Displays have separate Spaces if you plug in an external screen.
4. 4Test focus before your first ranked lobby: click the browser, come back to the game, press D. If nothing happens, you now know why.
5. 5Get into the habit of scrolling without clicking, just by hovering the pointer over the page.
6. 6Close anything unrelated to the game, especially on a fanless laptop.