That’s exactly it. The Dock already “lies” to you in Lion. The OS can kill processes if it runs low on memory without indicating that the app just quit and it w

That’s exactly it. The Dock already “lies” to you in Lion. The OS can kill processes if it runs low on memory without indicating that the app just quit and it will keep processes running if it has plenty of resources even if the user explicitly quits the app. (Developers have to allow the OS to do that.) What annoys me about this is that to the user, the behavior seems unpredictable. Many apps now (appear to) quit automatically, i.e. they disappear from the Dock (which I think is better than the old way of apps hanging around forever in the Dock if you don’t quit them manually) but equally many apps don’t do that. That has been a problem before but in the past at least most apps did the same. Now you don’t know what’s going to happen. Another problem are apps you want to run all the time like Mail or Skype. If you have Mail or Skype already in the Dock as a shortcut to launch the app, there is no way for you to tell whether you already launched to app or not. I find that to be extremely annoying. (You can re-enable the indicator in System Preferences, though.)