274587 - Have File menu:Quit become File menu:Close if multiple windows are open

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[Eric D]

Hello,

Could FireFox please change "Quit" to "Close" if multiple windows are open?

Or, alternately, throw up a dialogue box ASKING if you want to quit all open
windows if you accidentally quit one window without intending to quit all other
open windows.

Given the way people use computers now and the over-abundance of RAM rarely do I
actually need to or intend to QUIT a web browser fully.

Thanks.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

After looking at several apps in OS X all of them use 'quit' as the last item in
the application menu. (Flash MX, iChat, Safari, Word, iTunes)

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan]

For changing Quit to close this would be a dupe of bug 171892.

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

This is against the Apple User Interface Guidelines :
<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGMenus/chapter_7_section_4.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000356/CIHDGFJB>

The close-window command (apple-w) is in the file-menu, the quit-application
command (apple-q) is in the application menu. They're /NOT/ the same, quitting
is not closing. A dialog as you describe can be used (bug 39057), but please
allow us to switch it off.

>Given the way people use computers now and the over-abundance of RAM rarely do
> I actually need to or intend to QUIT a web browser fully.

That's exactly why you shouldn't quit the application, but only close the window.

Comment 4

[Kevin Brosnan]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041213
Firefox/1.0+
In the current nightly, having 'Warn before closing multiple tabs' checked
prevents any window with 2 or more tabs from being closed. Firefox --> quit will
close any window in the background with only one tab. It also will close the
current window if only one tab is open.

Comment 5

[Bruce Davidson]

Recommend WONTFIX for this.

Every Mac application (with the exception of the Finder) has a Quit menu item
and it should do what it says on the tin. There might be a case for expanding
the warning dialog on quit to warn about minimised windows etc. with only one
tab, but it should still quit the app.

(BTW: I'm assuming, like previous commenters, this was supposed to be raised
with OS set to "Mac OS X" rather than "Linux". Reporter if you're really raising
this against a Linux on Mac build please state this and let us know what window
manager etc. you're using.)

Comment 6

[Eric D]

This was indeed a Linux-related posting!

Under Macintosh OS X (distinct from Macintosh HARDWARE) this is not an issue since (under normal 
circumstances) you have only one "instance" (menu-bar/dock entry) of an app open at a time. Under 
xwindows window managers each window has its own menu-bar and thus it becomes very easy to quit 
the whole application by accident by selecting quit from any one of the open windows.

(different window manager (Aqua(?) vs. GNOME), different way of doing things)

Ubuntu Hoary (unstable), GNOME 2.8 (IIRC). However, the window manager won't matter since it's 
FireFox that controls the menu entries.

> (BTW: I'm assuming, like previous commenters, this was supposed to be raised
> with OS set to "Mac OS X" rather than "Linux". Reporter if you're really raising
> this against a Linux on Mac build please state this and let us know what window
> manager etc. you're using.)

Comment 7

[Eric D]

Re: LINUX version of FireFox

As a Mac user I'm inclined to having a dialogue pop up asking if you wanted to close the window (this is 
a *HUGE* pain in the derriere with web browsers... over the years I've lost hundreds of hours of 
browsing effort because of this).

But, given that the world DOES revolve around MS Windows, an equally acceptable solution would be to 
have quit replaced by close (or else deal with the whole problem caused by menu-in-window windows).

Comment 8

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

GNOME HIG (and indeed, all of the GNOME apps I use) have a Quit option in the menu.

Note that there is also two Close items in the same menu (Tab/Window) that are
well separated from Quit.  If you get all the way to Quit, one would assume that
you're choosing it on purpose.  A better solution is to not use File->Quit since
it seems to result in problems for you.

Comment 9

[Eric D]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Note that there is also two Close items in the same menu (Tab/Window) that are
> well separated from Quit.  If you get all the way to Quit, one would assume that
> you're choosing it on purpose.  A better solution is to not use File->Quit since
> it seems to result in problems for you.

<groan> Yes, I am WELL AWARE of that. However, there is an obvious problem here
and that's caused by the issue of being able to quit an application, when not
intending to. The only browser I know of that does ask if you want to quit when
multiple windows are open in OmniWeb (a Mac OS X-only app which doesn't suffer
from the conceptual design flaws of menu-in-window).

In Windows, IE developers have devised a half-decent solution by putting "Close"
at the bottom of the File menu when multiple windows are open. Yes, it's not
entirely in line with Quit at the bottom of File menu, BUT it is a tolerable
solution since people rarely want to quit ALL of the web browser windows when
they quit one (NOTE: this is only an issue when multiple dock entries for one
app <> multiple, independent "instances" of the application (I seem to remember
that once-upon-a-blue moon you could tell IE on Windows to open up a new
instance for each IE window)).

An alternate way (and, IMNSHO better way) of dealing with this would be to ask a
user (on xwindows/Windows) if they really intended to quit _all_ open windows.

With the way people use computers now (never close apps) this is a logical
safety value to prevent inadvertent quits. Back in the day when RAM was scarce
and apps were notoriously unstable, quit was a necessary part of computing. Now
we have stable apps, stable OSes and tabbed browsing. At least some browsers
will now ask if you want to close all other tabs in a browser (has saved me a
lot of browsing effort more than once), but now it's time to take that one step
further and ensure that a quit was really intended as a quit.

This has always been a design flaw in browsers that was only really useful for
quickly hiding evidence of what one was browsing for (e.g. someone browsing for
porn and quickly trying to hide all evidence with a mass quit before someone
walked in the room; or, as recently happened to me, browsing for a ring & hiding
evidence thereof... though, there are different ways of doing that... called
"Hide" (command-H on Mac), minimise to panel in GNOME).

And, I'm sure the browsers will still have a preference to accomodate the desire
for a mass quit. The design flaw is that apps should confirm "destructive" acts.
Granted, browsing doesn't in-and-of-itself result in the creation of something,
BUT, arguably the effort of browsing is itself as valuable to a user as would
be, let's say, writing an e-mail in Evolution or constructing a spread sheet in
GNUmeric.

Comment 10

[Eric D]

(In reply to comment #9)
> And, I'm sure the browsers will still have a preference to accomodate the desire
> for a mass quit. The design flaw is that apps should confirm "destructive" acts.
> Granted, browsing doesn't in-and-of-itself result in the creation of something,
> BUT, arguably the effort of browsing is itself as valuable to a user as would
> be, let's say, writing an e-mail in Evolution or constructing a spread sheet in
> GNUmeric.

An alternate solution is to have the browser remember all open windows and tabs
(but, again, the only one that is even close to having this working properly is
OmniWeb... I just don't like other elements of OmniWeb enough to use it).

Comment 11

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

*** Bug 337972 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***