[Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item

[Jeffrey Baker <jwbaker acm org>]

This email is inspired by Galeon 1.3.3, which is
infuriating because it lacks the Quit menu item.

I think "Quit" needs to stay.  It is true that Quit
originated on the Mac which couldn't multitask, but I think
it is still relevant today.  Let's consider a few things:

There is no difference between "Close all windows" and
"Quit".  If you close all the windows, you no longer have
any way to interact with the application, so it should have
exited.  It is no longer needed.  If it did not exit it is
simply wasting resources.

Some justifcations for tossing Quit seem to imply that all
applications ever started should simply be left running.
This is totally obsurd.  I'd love to keep Evolution and
Galeon running all the time, but I don't have 85 Exabytes of
memory.  Actually I lied: I don't want Galeon running all
the time.  I want it to go away.  It is the same reason I
put books on the shelf even if I intend to read them again
later.  If I just leave them laying about my tabletop gets
crowded and unsightly.

Furthermore, the usability of certain applications is
positively terrible without Quit.  In Galeon, for example,
there is no way to discard your HTTP Authorization
passwords, except exiting the application.  There is also no
way to tell Galeon to remember the 18 windows you have open,
except to "Quit with Session".  More on that later.  Finally
there is no way to make Galeon discard your non-persistent
session cookies except to exit.  Basically this is the same
problem as the HTTP Authorization.

Now, I can see replacing Quit, but only *after* the above
usability problems are addressed.  Think about the fantastic
"Exit with session" feature in Galeon.  When you use it,
Galeon exits and frees your resources.  But it remembers
what was going on and restores the situation when you next
start the program.  This is great!  It should probably be
the default behavior of Quit.

How can you replace Quit and still be highly usable?  In
my personal view, the user should be able to Quit any
application and GNOME will take care of it.  Quit should
close all the windows and exit the process while saving
state.  If I Quit Galeon, for example, the application
should exit, freeing all its memory, etc.  When I start it
again, it should restore exactly the state it had before I
exited.

On the GNOME and Window Manager side, it should be possible
to Quit or Minimize All <whatever> Windows after
right-clicking on the application in the window list applet.
For example the present window list applet lacks the ability
to minimize or close my 38 terminals in one stroke.  

Lastly, Galeon needs several improvements before it can
jettison Quit.  Primarily it should convince Mozilla.org to
stop being such a memory pig.  After that there must be a
way to flush HTTP Authorizations and secure session cookies.
These are HTTP protocol issues and we can't improve
usability by just ignoring them.

-jwb