Exploding windows

I've encountered "exploding windows" on both Windows and Linux lately.  I try to resize a window and by clicking the window near the title bar, the window suddenly and unexpectedly expands to fill the entire vertical area of the monitor it inhabits.  Sometimes I'm able to do the simple resize operation which I wanted but randomly the operation results in an exploding window.  Perhaps the UI designer thought this was a neat feature but it causes me to curse each time I encounter it.  I'd love to figure out how to disable this behavior but each time I try to describe it in a Google search, I'm led down a rabbit hole of unrelated results.  It seems silly spending too much time researching something which while annoying only costs me annoyance and a few seconds to correct.