Canonical won't quit you: Ubuntu losing the "quit" button?
Radical ideas are usually met with a great deal of resistance. I suspect this one from Canonical will be no different: Matthew Paul Thomas is proposing that the “Quit” command is a relic and should be gotten rid of. Maybe he’s right.
Go read the post for a full summary, but Thomas proposes that Quit is “a relic from the days when the Macintosh had no hard disk and couldn’t multitask.” If nothing else, the post makes for interesting reading about how and why the Quit button (or Exit for you Windows folks) came to be. It’s also an interesting re-evaluation of an idea that most users take for granted.
According to Thomas, Quit is just weird now:
Most obviously, there is a problem with Web browsers. First, people have gotten more comfortable with the idea of having multiple Web sites open at the same time. Second, Web applications have become more common and more stateful. And third, since 2003, Web browsers have competed partly on how minimalist their interfaces can be — which has made the browsers less and less obvious as applications themselves.
As a result, the effect of “Quit” in a browser is now bizarre. For example, imagine that you have windows open for Amazon, Banshee, Calculator, eBay, Empathy, Facebook, Gmail, and Shotwell. What happens if you choose “Quit” in the Gmail window? Gmail quits, but Amazon, eBay, and Facebook quit too, while Banshee, Calculator, Empathy, and Shotwell stay open. How much sense does that make? Not much.
I’m resisting my immediate response to the idea, which is “you’ll pry Quit out of my cold, dead hands.” Why? Thomas may have a point. Not for power users — I know what Quit is going to do and I use it on purpose. Even on my Core i7 laptop with 8GB of RAM, sometimes Firefox gets a bit boggy. Plus I use Quit to reset Firefox when I’ve finished a piece of writing or project to clear the ridiculous number of tabs that I wind up with. It’s far faster and more convenient than closing them all manually or even closing each browser windows.
But just because it’s not confusing to me, it seems that the UX testing that Canonical, Firefox, and Chrome have been doing have been turning up a lot of UX weirdness for many users. I’d submit that about 90% of the folks likely to read this blog are unlikely to qualify as “normal” users. If you’re interested in what Canonical is or isn’t doing with the Quit button, you probably are more computer savvy than most folks who use computers.
Like most things we take for granted, it’s going to be hard to quit the Quit button. It takes stubbornness to ditch features that we all expect. Apple has done us some favors in this regard — finally putting the kibosh on the floppy disk, for instance. (And it looks like the company may be making headway in ditching physical media altogether with the MacBook Air and iPad.)
So take a few minutes and ponder the question. Can we, should we, quit Quit, or is this a bad UX decision in the making?
