[rekonq] quit vs. close

[Felix Rohrbach]

Am Freitag, 19. August 2011, 17:20:55 schrieb Andrea Diamantini:
> On Friday 19 August 2011 11:14:36 Thomas Zander wrote:
> > On Friday 19 August 2011 10.35.37 Andrea Diamantini wrote:
> > > > So, in short, it doesn't make sense to me, and from experience I
> > > > know
> > > > that it doesn't make sense to a lot more people
> > > 
> > > It seems to me you are suffering the same problem you see in my
> > > workflow.
> > > In  fact I sincerely trust that the quit = close window habit comes
> > > from the multitasking design of konqueror.Let's expose the problem
> > > in this terms: if we add the quit action at the
> > > end  of the rekonq menu (in the same way Firefox or Chromium do) the
> > > quit
> > > action now will close one window, while in Firefox and Chrom*, the
> > > same
> > > will close the whole app.
> > 
> > Thats why I wrote this at the end of my last email ;)
> > 
> > > > Being consistent and predictable is important for user
> > > > satisfaction.
> > > > If
> > > > you can't be consistent with everyone else, make sure you go
> > > > with
> > > > the
> > > > 'safe' ones so losing work is cut to a minumum.
> > 
> > reusing the behavior of firefox and chromium looses more user-data than
> > reusing the behavior of other KDE apps.
> > 
> > Also, firefox and chromium were designed for Windows first, where both
> > virtual desktops and activities are not present.  The concept of running
> > remote X applications is even unique to Linux.
> > 
> > > And I'm quite sure this make sense to a lot of more
> > > people of the ones used
> > > to  dolphin/konqueror behavior.
> > 
> > At the cost of hurting the ones that are used to the KDE interaction
> > model. The alternative is that those used to Firefox have to press
> > Ctrl-Q the same amount of times they have windows open.  Which is not
> > exactly painful, is it? I mean, if you put a lot of time into opening
> > 10 rekonq windows, how much of a pain is it to close those 10 windows
> > too?
> > I'd say its worth the time when this means the user will avoid loosing
> > windows that were not meant to be closed.
> 
> You are probably not used a lot to read all bugs reported against rekonq. I
> can just say that for people using a browser is a really common experience
> in every OS they use.
> And their experience is basically based on Firefox behavior. That's the
> road, you can't do nothing about this.
> 
> > Bottom line still is that rekonq is a KDE application, behaving similar
> > to other KDE applications makes a lot of sense.
> 
> Yes, it makes sense for me too. But this cannot be a "forced model",
> otherwise it can be always applied against decisions like menubar,
> webkit/khtml, the development itself of rekonq...
> 
> > Anyway, I've done as much as I can in defending the usability side as I
> > see it, any decision you make is fine with me :)
> 
> Let me joke a bit, it seems you "pushed" your vision a bit too much ;)
> 
> 
> IMHO, the question is not closed. I'd like to hear again Felix and the other
> opinions about what it is better to do.

I'm not quite sure about that question. When Thomas told me that the other KDE 
applications behave the way that quit == close window, I didn't know that the 
other browsers behave in another way. One the one hand, we want to integrate 
ourselves into KDE, on the other hand we want to make browser-change easy, as 
for most users rekonq is not the first browser they use. Currently, I'm again a 
bit more for the quit == quit app. The reasons:

1. In a standard rekonq configuration, there is no UI way to quit rekonq. The 
only way is to use Ctrl + Q. As shortcuts are mostly used by experienced 
users, we can assume that the user used Firefox/Chromium/... before and 
therefore knows the difference between closing a window and quitting an 
application.

2. There is a difference between close and quit in other KDE applications, too. 
For example, all the applications that use system tray icons minimize to that 
system tray when closed, but on quit also the system tray is "closed". If you 
quit an application, you expect it to quit everything, close all connections, 
save the configs, remove temporary data, so that you have a clean start when 
you start the application again. As example, for rekonq you expect your 
session cookies to be deleted. In my opinion, quit is more than close.

So I am a bit more in favour of the quit == quit application principle, hoping 
that users who don't know the difference between close and quit won't search 
for a quit shortcut ;)

Regards,
Felix