The behavior in question is actually very new, as it became part of the guidelines only starting with 10.7 Lion. As Lion brought forth a whole lot of similar behavioral changes (which often conflict with those of either Windows/Linux or older versions of OS X), very few apps have adapted to the new rules so far.

I think the new rules assume that apps are persisting any (invisible) state across quit/launch.

iPhoto has done it forever. It still feels "wrong" to me though. I guess I understand the reasoning behind it, and iOS mostly works that way (at least as far as a normal user will notice), but so many Mac OS apps - both current and historical - have _not_ worked that way, so iPhoto always seems strange to me.

iPhoto is a single-window application - only one window is ever used. Such applications usually (and should) quit on closing the main window. Immediate examples I can think of are System Preferences, calculator, but there are many more examples

Anything that allows working with multiple documents should remain open even with no windows (or unless auto-killed).

Give it a try with TextEdit and you'll see the expected response.

Cmd W closes the document without quitting TextEdit. just tested on lion.

Mac is document-based instead of application-based so closing document doesn't quit the app. it only does if multiple documents doesn't make sense to the application like System Preferences.

You're doing it wrong.

This is the HIG quote from above:

> "In general, quit when users close the last open window in your app. [...] If users close the last remaining document window in a document-based app and switch to another app, it’s appropriate to quit the app" (emphasis added).

In TextEdit, close the last document and then _switch to another app_. You're missing the last step.

did it again adding the last step (switching to other app), still there though - Lion 10.7.4

The TextEdit behavior might actually be the OS silently closing an unused application that implements the necessary hooks for saving state and indicating when clean-up is required on termination. That behavior was introduced in 10.7, but IIRC, can be disabled by the user.

Worked for me... Mountain Lion 10.8.1.

    1) Opened TextEdit
    2) Started a document
    3) Closed document (Cmd-W)
    4) Switched to Chrome
    5) *poof* TextEdit disappeared

exactly what i did. maybe it was changed in ML.

No, Lion exhibits this behavior for me. Close last TextEdit window, switch to another app, see TextEdit silently go away from the dock.

how long do i need to wait to observe that behavior?

It's immediate. Doesn't happen on Snow Leopard, for me.

It seems to be one of non-Mac users biggest complaints but I love it. I can close my Chrome windows and remove the clutter without having to pay the cost of having it start up again. It's a good-bad habit because then I go to Linux and Ctrl+W all my tabs and then hit Ctrl+T and realize my mistake.

The thing that confuses me the most about it is when I close the last window of an app, 95% of the screen shows the app beneath it but the menus are still for the app I just closed. I guess that's partly a crossover with the focus model as well, but it's just a bit alien to me. As you say, it's really a non-Mac user thing; I only use OSX 5% of the time at work so never really get used to it.

I really don't see much difference in clutter between minimising to the taskbar and having an icon on the dock.

It's odd to hit the x to close and the program actually just minimizing. Odder still was that when I hit minimize, by default, it minimized to a separate icon to the main application. I changed to it minimizing into the dock icon. But the inconsistent behavior of the x button means sometimes it and the _ button (I can't call these close and minimize on this system because that's not what they are anymore) have similar, if not identical, functionality.

Huh? I don't think you understand what I'm talking about...

To prevent Firefox from closing, go to about:config and set browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab to false. This is one of the first things I do when I (re)install a computer, I don't like the default behaviour either :)