Application open after closing window?

[thebrok2]

I have not been on a Mac since the Oregon trail days. I have sort of a random question.

When I close a window of an application such as Safari or a terminal it doesn't really close the application. What I mean by that is that if I alt tab or in mac world command tab i still see the application open. I then have to go to the top and click quit. What is the reason behind this? Does this continue to use up resources such as CPU and Ram?

 

[Zoolook]

Yes you're correct, it just closes the window. To quit either select quit from the menu, or press Apple-Q on the keyboard to quit the app.

It's a different way of working to Windows, but the reason is that you can clear the desktop of clutter if necessary, and keep the app in RAM for a quick launch later. It doesn't really take any noticable CPU cycles because once the window is closed, it should not be doing anything significant, but it may take RAM.

OS X is far better optimised for memory use than WinXP or Vista and still a bit better than Win7, so the system will give front running apps priority. If you have 4GBs of RAM or more, you'll barely notice unless you're doing something very RAM intensive.

Incidentally, Windows itself may quit the app when you close the last window, but hold the app in RAM for some time for a quick launch, whereas in OS X when you quit, it really has quit. That's why you get apps like freemem on Windows.

 

[thebrok2]

Great Reply, Thank you so much for your input. I just need to get a little more savy with the keyboard shortcuts and I will never look back. Thanks again for the great reply!

 

[Zoolook]

You're welcome.

 

[JWJones]

This is one of the primary differences between the Mac OS and Windows or Linux. The Mac OS is "document-centric," whereas Windows and Linux are "application-centric."

To me, this is one of the primary advantages of the Mac OS. I don't use Windows, but I do also use Linux (Arch Linux w/KDE 4).