I agree on a technical level, but the UX change is non-trivial. In fact, it violates an implicit promise of the UI: the Dock shows you all the applications you've opened. Maybe techies like us understand that the app was closed to save resources, and it's a mere annoyance to re-open. But to all the "moms" out there, it's just broken: they opened it so they can use it, and now it's not there anymore. This makes the OS feel broken, which makes the computer feel broken.

There's no reason not to leave an entry in the Dock so as to maintain the user's expectations, while still recouping background resources as needed.

It's been my experience that all the "moms" aren't the ones opening an application, closing all the windows, and then sometime later expecting that application to be there so they can command-tab to it. Instead I see a million apps left running on the dock because they clicked the red button on the window when they were done with the app.

This times 1,000. Mom's don't use alt+tab. The thing people aren't appreciating is that when you reopen the app (which is available via Mission Control, via Spotlight, via the Finder or perhaps via the Dock), it restores to the place it was when it was left (if there were windows open).

I strongly disagree. There are a strong contingent of clueless power users out there: people who don't know a lot about computers (and don't want to), but who still use them for many different tasks, every day. And these users do so by forming familiar habits. And while some of these habits are bound to be broken by new OS releases, I don't think it should be done lightly. This may be a small issue, but I still think it was a poor design choice.

My aunt is kind of like this. She projects an air of knowing absolutely nothing about computers and mild distaste for them, and yet she's the most capable non-techie I know, and has occasionally been known to drop phrases like "PCI bus" in conversation.

She used to be a typist and a stenographer, so you're probably right about the forming habits key.

I've been unsuccessfully trying to educate my wife about this behavior for years! The windows model of "app closes with last window" seems to be too far ingrained in her to change.

Apple’s current implementation certainly is dodgy but I think the ultimate goal is very desirable. Whenever I explain the difference between quitting and closing a window on OS X to someone their eyes glaze over (even when I ignore all the inconsistencies). It’s just something no casual user understands. Nobody has the same problem when using iOS.

The transition period will be rocky and the UI in OS X is currently still very much optimized for the old model but I think Apple is walking in the right direction.

Making quit-on-close a UI recommendation for things that don't naturally run as a background service with no visible UI might be a cleaner solution.

I guess I would actually like all apps to quit on close. Apps that need it should be able to run in the background (sans any indicator that they are still running).

If all apps auto save and restore their state only very few apps actually need to run in the background: mail clients, music players, RSS readers, …

The dock could then show all apps with open windows (including hidden or minimized open windows) and Cmd-Tab could show recently used apps (including apps that are not running).

For this to work seamlessly all apps need to be able to auto save and restore state and all apps need to be sane about whether or not they need to run in the background. That’s certainly a daunting task and it’s understandable why Apple can’t (and won’t?) jump right to that.

Definitely all kinds of promises are being broken. Bottom line is that the Dock / Mission Control / Command-Tab / LaunchPad are a mess of mixed metaphors right now. As far as my mom is concerned though, she has no idea what is running or not. In fact, the Windows paradigm of closing the last window is more akin to her expectations even though she has never in her life used Windows.

I think non-techies were already quite confused by open applications with no visible Windows. It confused me when I first used a Mac, and I like to think I know what I'm doing.

I think the problem that most people have who are upset about this change is that they're actually using the dock and cmd-tab to switch between applications. Using an app launcher like alfred makes the concern trivial, as switching to an app and launching it use essentially the same action. In that sense, this auto quitting feature is actually a nice compliment to that type of workflow.

That's a ridiculous statement. Using Alt-Tab isn't my 'problem', it's a very efficient way to cycle between a few apps in heavy use.

In general I appreciate Lion's approach to quitting/restoring things, but they have messed up the associated Dock and Alt-Tab behaviour. I wouldn't be surprised to see this fixed in an update.

I think Apple has been backing away from that "promise" for a while now. Remember in Snow Leopard (or maybe it was Leopard?) when they disabled that white dot that used to show beneath running apps? That made it very hard to tell which apps were actually running, vs just docked in your Finder for easy access. I know a lot of people went and updated some plist to revert to the old behavior (I did, and also did so for my wife's computer). But it seems like that might have been an intentional move on Apple's part to make it less obvious which apps are running.

I thought that was in Lion? I'm still running Snow Leopard, and the white dot is still definitely there.

It wasn't even in Lion. They just added an option to disable the white dot in the Dock preference pane at some point. It's in Lion, but I don't remember when they added it, so it could have been there for a while (and I _know_ it's been disable able by plist since at least Leopard, probably since Cheetah/10.0).

Nope, the change came with 10.5. The commands explained here still work:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2007101815375480

It toggles your dock between 3D and 2D. The 3D setting still has the dots, but they're very hard to see. So I was wrong about them disappearing entirely, but that's the change I was referring to.

If you still have the 2D look in Lion perhaps you ran this command previously under Leopard? I did, and the setting survived my upgrade to Lion, so I still have the 2D enabled.

Ah, I only started using a Mac with 10.5 - the 3D dock with the faint dots is the only one I've ever known. It took me a while to notice the dots and realize what they mean.

Huh. I must have missed something. Through Leopard, Snow Leopard, and now Lion, I've never not seen that dot, and I certainly never changed any plists to accomplish that.

When I said "might have been an intentional move on Apple's part to make it less obvious which apps are running" I meant nothing nefarious on Apple's part.

Rather that they seem to be heading in a direction where they want the user to not be concerned with whether a particular app is running or not- just click on it, and it will pop up in the state you last left it, whether it was actually running or not. Just like (many apps) on iOS.

My question is why not just leave it pretending to be opened, then open it when you select it? Leave the dot on the dock, leave it in the alt+tab list, but don't actually have the process running. This seems like what they are actually trying to achieve: you remove all actual strain on the computer without breaking any promises.

> Expunging it from memory with application-level semantics is a potential win because it can theoretically prevent you from ever hitting swap even after using hundreds of apps over the course of weeks or months.

Other than saving some disk space, how is hitting swap to page an unused app back in significantly different from loading the app from memory again?

Because what the app has in memory after running for a while is not necessarily what it has in memory when it starts up.

This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, maybe it has saved you from some memory leaks. On the other hand, maybe it has cleared the infinite undo stack in your 3d modeling program.

Granted, you can always fall back on the argument that if developers support the APIs correctly, this isn't an issue, but that is putting a lot more trust in developers than is warranted based on historical evidence.

IME the Xbox 360/Xbox Live method of just building features into the system always wins out vs the PS3/PSN method of expecting developers to support the available APIs and do the right thing. In that context, I think just allowing virtual memory to do what it has always done is the better way to go.

Yes. And if the autosave/autorestore of state is done right, nobody should be able to tell.