Comment by sbf501
4 years ago
It's not "sloppy" it is just a different approach.
It drives me nuts on Windows that when I close FireFox the entire APPLICATION closes! I just wanted to close the window. Now when I start it again / open a new window, I have to enter my LastPass credentials. And pay the boot penalty.
IMHO, a multi-window app should not exit when I close the last window.
Linux Desktops and Windows both do this, macOS does not.
> IMHO, a multi-window app should not exit when I close the last window. Linux Desktops and Windows both do this, macOS does not.
On Linux' Firefox, this does not seem to be the case. I just confirmed by closing a window with a few dozen tabs, and my other windows were perfectly fine. Same goes for VS Code, IDEA, Ghidra, Tilix, etc. This might be Wayland-specific behavior, but closing one window does not appear to take the rest of the apps with it (unless they were a child process).
You are correct, with a subtle modification: there are a "Close Window" and "Exit Application" mode in some popular X-based windowed apps (see: VSCode). Some apps, like Eclipse, solve this by hosting the child windows in a parent container. But then you lose screen real estate.
But you always need ONE child window open or it will exit entirely.
MacOS has a different approach, where the application top level process keeps running, even if it has no windows, but this requires some sort of GUI element to communicate with application.
When you close all open firefox windows is firefox still running? On MacOS it is. On windows and Linux it isn't. It has nothing to do with "other apps"
How can you make it behave like Linux and Windows? I don't want my applications to persist when their visual presence is gone, it's disingenuous to the user.
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I'm the complete other way. First thing I did when setting up MacOS was to install RedQuits. I think it stopped working sometime after an update. I never liked my dock crowding up with things.
And with Firefox, it would make the "Restore all tabs on open" not work, since clicking X didn't close the app, and thus pressing Firefox again would just create a new empty window. For it to work, I had to not use the red button, but cmd + q or the menu bar.