Re: [Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item



On Wed, 2003-03-19 at 14:37, Dave Bordoley wrote:
> Who cares what is in memory, in fact what is memory? Most regular 
> everyday users don't care about this stuff. They deal with windows that 
> are opened and closed. The fact that when all galeon windows are closed 
> galeon is removed from memory is an implementation detail.

Granted, most every day users couldn't give two shits about what's in
memory. But here are a few places where it might be of concern:
1) I've got a P3-1GHz with 320mb of ram... not exactly a clunker... OO.o
takes up a nice 220MB footprint of my RAM... Galeon with a few tabs,
another 37MB... Nautilus, 18MB... Evolution with all of its associated
processes, about 50MB... Gaim, 8MB... etc. etc. etc... When I've got all
of thsoe running, my harddisk is crunching virtual memory like a ADHD
kid crunches ritalin... If I tell one of these to quit, I expect to see
some system performance improvement, not have them simply be no longer
visible...
2) I do online banking with my browser... I pay my credit card bills
online... I accumulate session cookies at secure websites that advise me
to close my browser to ensure nobody can go back to those sites as me...
if Galeon doesn't "vacate itself from memory", my session cookies don't
expire... my HTTP authentication to my email doesn't expire... imagine
this scenario at a kiosk or a public terminal... this would be *bad*...
users are used to quitting the program giving them a clean slate when
they start back up, not simply having the application cease to be
visible...


> >Are we moving to a "Close All
> >Windows" scheme?  What if you're in the GIMP? Does "Close All Windows"
> >close the toolbox?
> >
> Close all windows is worst than quit. Since the operation doesn't do 
> what it claims to do, instead it closes a subset of windows that happen 
> to belong to a certain application.
> 
> >
> >I read the thread posted in Jeffrey's bug. I still am not really clear
> >why we're doing this. It seems to break a lot of user expectations.
> >
> Only if you have a firm grasp of unix processes.
> 

Maybe what's needed here is a good study of different scenarios
involving different applications uses of windows, tabs, etc. and the
various pieces of language used (close, quit, close all, quit all, etc)
and maybe find some sort of consistent settlement. I think getting rid
of quit is dangerous.

-jag
 
---------------------------------------------------------
Joshua Adam Ginsberg	       Cellphone: 970.749.8530
Rice University '02	       Email: joshg myrealbox com
St. Mark's School of Texas '98
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