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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Why do apps think it is necessary to start playing with the UI when we have a minimise button? When I click "X" I expect the application to exit as it did in Windows 1.0 and the minimise button to either put it in the startbar or the status bar but keep running.

EDIT: I remembered incorrectly, Windows 1.0 did not have a X button but a close button on the right side of the window.

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Apps minimizing to systray when their main window is closed have existed since at least Windows 95/98. Yahoo! Messenger and probably AOL did the same thing 25 years ago.

Minimising to the stray isn't so much the problem as remaining connected to the voice chat. Skype in this circumstance doesn't fully minimise but still has a little foreground window making it obvious that you're still on the call.

Yes, that much I agree with - having an ongoing voice call with no active window is definitely not normal behavior. Even playing audio with no visible window is strange, but recording is even stranger.

Minimize keeps cluttering up the taskbar. That's why all persistent-background apps go into the systray, be it chat apps, mouse drivers, graphics driver or whatever. You don't want them to fill up your taskbar for no reason. This has been common practice since the Windows95 days.

Windows could handle this a bit better (e.g. different symbol than "X"), but there is nothing wrong with the behavior itself. A clear icon to indicate that the mic is in use wouldn't hurt either.

This is a case of lackluster UI that everybody got used to over the years and never fixed, not some kind of evil dark pattern thing.

I think people are just arguing that this is a terrible practice. Instead of having a clogged up taskbar, you have a clogged up tray. In hindsight, Microsoft should have somehow added a better UI affordance back in the 90s, to disincentives this abuse.

Mac has its own share of applications going against the OS convention. There are quite a few third party Mac applications that annoyingly force the process to exit when the user closes the main window. There are Mac apps that are also starting to intercept ⌘Q and not exiting the process or, infuriatingly, making you hold the key down in order to actually exit (I'm looking at you, Chrome).

I wish product designers would please just stop thinking their app is uniquely special, second guessing OS conventions.

> When I click "X" I expect the application to exit as it did in Windows 1.0

X didn't appear until Windows 95.

In Windows 1.0 there was no X button.

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