Traditionally, the x button (close button, if you will) can be found in the upper right corner of a window. Because it actually touches the very edges of the screen, you don’t have to carefully aim with your mouse pointer; you just move your mouse up there until it hits the corner, and then you click. I always found this very convenient and efficient.
But recently, I have noticed that more and more applications choose to position the x button a few pixels away from the corner. It’s almost there, but not really, and that forces you to consciously and carefully aim with your mouse. What is the rationale behind that? Subjectively, it feels like spiteful vandalism on the designer’s part, aimed to annoy the end user, but I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical reasoning behind it; I just can’t think of any.
Any UI designers here who can explain this?
Also, why does it bother me so much? It’s only 0.1 seconds of my life wasted, but it feels like a real chore.
It’s worse on a Mac, for two reasons: the close button is a small round ball set in 1/8" from the edges, and it isn’t a “close application” button–it closes the window but the app remains running in the background.
Thankfully, every single app responds to Command-Q to quit. In Windows-land, most apps are gravitating toward Ctrl-W, but a few holdouts still require the clumsy alt-F4 combo.
Does Ctrl-W terminate the app or just close the current window? Specifically, for apps that can run in multiple windows (MDI, Multiple Document Interface) or multiple tabs at once?
I’m running on a Linux box here with Gnome. The editor, gedit, can open multiple files in separate tabs. Ctrl-W just closes the current file and the tab it’s in. Firefox, likewise. Control-Q closes the whole app. Each tab has its own X and the entire app has its X.
Whenever I’d have an program that I couldn’t get to open maximized and I’d ask for help (usually here), people would always suggest that I stretch the window all the way to the screen’s borders and save it like that…it’s just the same! It seemed like I could never quite explain to people why a maximized window isn’t the same as an unmaximized but stretched out window, but what you’ve said is exactly it. Things located at the edges of the window aren’t there when the window isn’t maximized. Worse, even, if you try to close the window, there’s a good chance you’ll close the one behind it.
It typically closes the current tab (at the whims of the developer). Then when the last tab is closed, the window+app closes.
That makes sense since Windows has the menu bar on the app window–there wouldn’t be an easy way to get at the menu after closing the last window. Macs have the menu bar at the top of the screen, and that stays around even after you close the app’s windows.
Within MS-Windows, unless the program is especially weird, the X is placed by the OS, not by the program.
Within a browser, the close button for a things like popup windows are sometimes specially placed by the page designer. And these people often have issues. They want things to look “cool”, show off skills, etc. So things get ugly and user unfriendly really easily.
Also, with some popups, the whole point is to make the window harder to close. They want you to take longer, look more carefully at it, etc.
I’ve seen the “x” in the upper left, lower right, not visible at all, etc. I just go with Ctrl-W. But of course sometimes that’s bad as it also closes the background window. (I’m look at you oliviasoftware.)
I don’t really care too much either way, but my mild preference is for it to be the way you dislike. That’s because it’s very easy to randomly or haphazardly move the mouse to an extreme corner and once it’s there, it’s also very easy to immediately or subsequently click a button by accident, unintentionally and perhaps catastrophically closing an important window. It’s not good when it’s all too easy to do something which can easily be problematic.
I’ve also encountered a lot of ads with the x in the upper left corner, or even in a bottom corner. It’s designed to make it harder to close, but I subconsciously blacklist all products that use it, so it seems a little counterproductive to me.
Only if you are setting everything to be full-screen maximized, instead of using windows as windows, like they’re intended to be. And personally I like having the taskbar on the right side of the screen, as it’s a much more efficient use of space on a widescreen monitor than having it along the bottom or top, so that would never be a way of closing something. And if you’re really concerned with efficiency, you should be using keyboard shortcuts anyway, as others have mentioned.
There’s hardly any reason to ever quit an application these days. If you have a poorly written application that needs to be restarted, then sure, but other than that there’s zero reason not to leave them running with no windows open.
I have the opposite issue on Windows. I close the last Office document using the Window control (not crtl-W) and the app quits, which wouldn’t suck except Office 2013 takes forever to launch. Office for Mac runs better than the Windows version, for crying out loud.
My experience is that you’ll often wind up waiting forever as the app very slowly copies its memory back from disk. One of the most annoying things is when I leave the GIMP open (even with no active windows), surf the Internet for a while, and then return and have to wait on a black screen for a minute. It takes like four seconds to start up from disk.
And then the same thing happens to Firefox or chrome when you come back. Chrome will cheat by storing an image and showing it, but it’s unusable until the app loads up again.
Though I’ve never had a computer that uses an SSD, which I would hope would alleviate this a lot. But then I’d expect the application to start up more quickly, too.
Also, doesn’t Office have a quick start program that runs in the tray? Those actually are optimized to load back into memory quickly. In theory, you could do that with any program, but that’s not how they are handled in my experience. You just rely on Superfetch.
In MS Windows, the X button is NOT in the upper right corner unless you are maximised. It is inside the border.
In old versions of Windows, the border was narrow, so it was difficult to hit, and you’d normally get the X instead of the boarder. AND, when maximised, the border was drawn outside the screen. So if you went up to the corner of the screen on a miximised window, you got the button.
On modern versions of Windows, unless you force the display into some kind of WinXP (2K, 98) compatibility mode, the borders are wide. On Vista, by
Beginning with Windows 8, moving the cursor all the way to the upper right corner of the screen activates the meta menu (I don’t know the proper term) so that pixel needs to be reserved.