Re: [Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 02:04:34PM -0800, Jeffrey Baker wrote: 
> But, with time, Galeon grows and grows and grows and grows and
> grows.  The only way to shrink it is if you have Quit.  If you don't
> have quit, eventually the whole application will crash (due to the
> OOM killer) and THAT is pretty bad for usability.

If Galeon has a huge memory leak, then get it fixed. The app shouldn't
have a "fix my memory leak bug" button, just fix the bug.

> Same thing goes for my editor.  If I have 5000 buffers open
> in emacs I can just exit the whole thing and destroy all my
> buffers.  This is very reasonable.  Even RMS wouldn't want me
> to have to close each buffer individually.  But you are
> saying that a Galeon user should be forced to close each
> Galeon window individually, regardless of the fact that some
> of them open up all by themselves?

You could have "close all windows" if you wanted to close all windows,
as windows are a user-visible concept. You can explain "close all
windows" using only user-visible concepts. You can't explain "quit."

>  Regardless of the fact
> that every single online bank out there advises the user to
> "Quit" their web browser when they are finished?

Well, Internet Explorer doesn't have Quit, so these instructions are
pretty dumb considering that 90%+ of users use IE.

Just proves that a "forget my secure information" button or menu item
would be a better solution.

If you can't explain a UI feature using user-understood concepts, the
UI feature is wrong. That's just a hard-and-fast rule. Flaming isn't
going to get you out of it, you're going to have to come up with
features to solve your problems that work in terms of
user-understandable concepts.

Havoc