'exit' closes all windows

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banjobacon!
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'exit' closes all windows

Post by banjobacon! »

Is this something people actually like? Although I usually use the close button, I have used File>Exit a few times and been surprised when all my browser windows close. Can this be disabled? And if it were disabled, the close window could be eliminated.

I'm sure some people like it the way it is, but is there something I can do to prevent this from happening again (besides getting used to it)?
LayZ
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Post by LayZ »

Just remember that 'Close' (further up the file menu) means close current window and Exit means close all windows.

Some people love this feature as a way to entirely exit the application, other people loathe it.

IE doesn't have an exit option.

Sometimes I find the menu option handy, but that's rare, I'm fine with or without the option, if I had to vote, I think I'd lean slightly on the side of it staying,
banjobacon!
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Post by banjobacon! »

So I have to get used to it.
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Thumper
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Post by Thumper »

It'll eventually get removed God willing. There was a heated debate about it around 0.2.

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Relativity_17
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Post by Relativity_17 »

Why remove it? It does serve a use for some people. Why not just rename it to something like, "Close All", or "Exit All", or "This is the button that closes all your Firebird windows. If you only want to close the currently selected window, click the 'Close' option above."
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Thumper
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Post by Thumper »

If you want to see the discussion, go search for it. Suffice to say that if there was a button that said "delete all my bookmarks" sitting at the bottom of the File menu I'd want rid of it too even it it served a useful purpose to some.

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banjobacon!
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Post by banjobacon! »

I agree with renaming it, and possible moving the "Close Window" down so I actually see it right before pressing "Exit".

I just hope someone will find a way to remove it so those of us that don't want it don't have to deal with it.
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martind
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Post by martind »

... I think I just opened the "File"-menu for the very first time, just to see what you are talking about ... why use the menu if there's a hotkey or gesture ...

Edit: thinking about it I just realized the only menus I ever use are Bookmarks and Tools.
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asquithea
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Post by asquithea »

Looking at my windoze box, I've got at least 7 different ways to close a window:

Alt+F4
Double-click the window icon
Click the close window decoration
File > Close Window
Ctrl + Shift + W
Window menu > Close
Taskbar menu > Close

... and I'm not even counting the different ways of opening the menus.

I don't think it unreasonable to have ONE way of closing all the windows in one go. I have to admit I didn't know that the option was there, but now that I do know, I'll be using it.

The wording looks fine to me. In just about all other applications that come to mind, Exit means just that - Exit the program. If it's an MDI interface, then there is a generally a "Close" alternative. I just tried it with M$ Word 2000, and it has the same behaviour as Moz. Firebird.

It's well out of the way of the other options, and it's on a seldom used menu. I say leave it alone.
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Thumper
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Post by Thumper »

It's a legacy of the monolithic browser suite. The advantages of keeping it (i.e. laziness) are generally outweighed by the inconvenience of errors (all windows shutting as opposed to just one) and the confusion caused by having two 'close' options.

On MacOS it's an OS requirement and should stay. Otherwise, it shouldn't.

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uberfoot
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Post by uberfoot »

asquithea wrote:Looking at my windoze box, I've got at least 7 different ways to close a window:

.... .... ....

I just tried it with M$ Word 2000, and it has the same behaviour as Moz. Firebird.

It's well out of the way of the other options, and it's on a seldom used menu. I say leave it alone.


In fact, you might want to add ctl+w to your list since that's a standardized hot key combo for closing windows.

And as you point out with your experiment with MS Word, the exit item is as much a part of the windows UI as it is a part of the MacOS UI. To get rid of it means to change the consistency of the UI which is the holy grail of most self respecting UI folks

Exit means exit the app, not the window. Certainly has had this meaning on Windows for the past many years and "I don't like it" or "I don't find it useful" is generally an insufficient reason to change well known and standard behaviours.

u
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Thumper
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Post by Thumper »

uberfoot wrote:And as you point out with your experiment with MS Word, the exit item is as much a part of the windows UI as it is a part of the MacOS UI. To get rid of it means to change the consistency of the UI which is the holy grail of most self respecting UI folks.


That's a complete fallacy. Menu consistency is nonexistent on Windows beyond a general copying of whatever Office is doing at the time, and at this time neither Office XP nor MSIE 6 have an "exit" item. Keeping it would be inconsistent UI.

Exit means exit the app, not the window. Certainly has had this meaning on Windows for the past many years and "I don't like it" or "I don't find it useful" is generally an insufficient reason to change well known and standard behaviours.


It isn't standard, and what's worse is that it is equally "well known" that an alternative to hitting the X in the top right of a window to shut it is to pick the bottom option on the File menu. Which in this case would cause dataloss if you have more than one window open.

Gah, I had this whole conversation months ago. It should still be in the forum archives.

- Chris
old jasonb
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Post by old jasonb »

thumperward wrote:at this time neither Office XP nor MSIE 6 have an "exit" item.

FYI: Office XP surely does have an Exit item - in all of its components. (This is not an argument, just a statement of fact.) Also, using Exit when in Word will close all instances of Word - however, it will not affect any other office component (say, Excel) that might be running. It's limited to every instance of the same component.
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Post by clav »

MS Office should not be used as an example of Windows conventions anyway, since it doesn't even use standard widgets. Its menus are quite markedly different, it doesn't use XP scrollbars (or at least not all the time), its dropdown lists on the toolbars are completely nonstandard, and its toolbar buttons don't normally match those win xp.
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asquithea
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Post by asquithea »

Well, in that case, would you care to furnish some examples of Windows applications that use some other standard? Because with the exception of M$ Internet Explorer, I'm having trouble finding any.

I'm used to having an Exit command. In the good old days of DOS, Alt+F,X was the keyboard shortcut to quit a program - (Alt+F4) came much later. Looking at my machine, it seems that most MDI (or even SDI) programs still provide that Exit command.

So far, I've got:
- Internet Explorer
- Command Prompt (doesn't conform to /any/ of the guidelines)

It's very common functionality. It might not be an official windows guideline (leastwise, I can't find it), but it's certainly become a defacto standard on that platform.
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