Worse than with Windows, your job is not now over. Now, you begin the task of scrubbing back and forth vertically, trying to force the labels to appear, hoping you won't go far enough out of range in the process to cause the bar to disappear on you. The corners and edges of the screen are predicted by Fitts's Law to be the most easily reached targets. The Dock hovers just above the bottom of the screen where it can safely avoid being in any way efficient. Dock objects have holes Carefully reproducing a bug in the original Macintosh, the new architects have built the Dock in such a way that users cannot click on transparent areas.
Users go right to the middle of the object they want, click, and then wait for something to happen.
It will be a long wait because nothing is going to happen if they happen to have clicked in an area with background showing through. Ensuring confusion, these same engineers have coded the objects such that hovering over a transparent area does, in fact, show the label. This way, the user receives feedback that everything is cool, when, in fact, everything is anything but. Dock users are reporting that they can now click in the background areas. This may be because Apple changed the code or because application programmers have learned to build a separate mask that includes the background areas.