Dashboard, Exposé, and Spaces were combined and renamed Mission Control in 2011 with the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

Exposé was first previewed on June 23, 2003, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as a feature of the then forthcoming Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

In Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, some features of Dashboard, Exposé, and Spaces were incorporated into Mission Control.

This issue was fixed in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, however, with a checkbox in the System Settings pane allowing a user to choose whether to group windows of the same application.

Some features of Exposé and Spaces from OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard did not return, however: it does not show the names of the windows displayed, nor does it return the added functionality provided by Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard multiple desktops feature, known as "Spaces," which allowed users to drag and drop windows between desktops with a single click, and also allowed for larger thumbnail previews of each desktop in a 2D grid when in use.

It also had another bug that causes an area of screen the width of the minimised preview to become unresponsive to mouse clicks requiring the windowserver to be restarted.

Using the Shift key, Mission Control can be activated in slow motion, as can Dashboard and the minimise effect and several other animations.

This is the same effect that was demonstrated by Steve Jobs during the unveiling of Exposé during the 2003 Worldwide Developers Conference.

Windows 10 adds a very similar feature called Task View which also includes multiple-desktop support.

Starting with version 3.0, the GNOME desktop environment has gained a new mode called "Overview", which is used to launch applications and manage workspaces.

For Classic or Legacy Macintosh systems, the free Finder Workspaces[8] offers functionality similar to Spaces.