Re: Microsoft was right with explorer windows

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

Dan Kaminsky wrote:

> Think about it...if you have ten explorer apps, and one of them presses
> exit, shouldn't convention dictate THEY ALL close, because explorer.exe
> should be exiting?
>
> Close was the right choice.

No.  Close shouldn't even shut down the application, but with the Explorer,
it does.

I'm not sure I follow your logic.  Each instance of Explorer uses the same
binary file.  However, each instance (i.e. process) executes in a separate
process space (i.e. chunk of virtual memory).  This is a universal concept
(ignoring the special case of 16-bit apps).

You are suggesting that hitting Exit in one should send a signal to all
other instances, across process boundaries, causing them to close, too?  In
that case, you're getting into IPC, which is quite an extended feature.

Why should Exit close all Explorer apps?  It doesn't on my version of
Windows.  The only way to close them all is to kill each one individually.

Unless you have some better support for your argument than your opinion, I
think it's safe to say that Microsoft flubbed their own UI style
statements.

John