[tnova]

> There's a difference, in almost every piece of software, between closing the last window and quitting. In a browser, just pressing the "close" button would lose all your tabs, whereas "quit" will preserve them. That makes no sense to someone coming from Linux or Windows;

MacOS distinguishes between closing an application's window and closing the whole application. Therefore, closing the last window will not automatically close the application as well. Consequently, in a browser pressing the close button results in all tabs getting closed, with the browser still running. Quit however closes the whole browser and, hence, preserves the tabs. This is the action triggered by pressing the close button on Windows and Linux.

I can understand that this is counterintuitive coming from Linux or Windows. But it is a design-choice coherently implemented throughout MacOS.

[beagle3]

I understand where it comes from, and in the days of floppy disks and 128KB memory, it made sense (I know, I'm that old). But it's been making progressively less sense over the last 30 years, with the advent of hard drives, faster hard drives, SSDs and GBs of memory.

It used to be the terminating a process you were going to reuse would cost you tens of seconds. That's no longer the case. The fact that it was a rational, consistent, design decision made 35 years ago doesn't mean it still makes sense. Apple killed the phone jack and the replaceable batteries, two things which are even older than that - things change.

[amaccuish]

I've been eaten by this when Firefox once didn't give me back all my tabs when I reopened. For earlier versions of MacOs there's Redquits, but it doesn't work now :(