>Or, when I close all the windows for a given program (usually there is just one), the program stays open until I navigate through the menu to explicitly quit.

>Or, when I close all the windows for a given program (usually there is just one), the program stays open until I navigate through the menu to explicitly quit. I understand this is a design decision, but it just seems counter-intuitive, as does much else with this computer. Things like this annoy me all day long. As you say, it's a design decision. You probably come from Windows -- their way is just as arbitrary, if not more. One reason is to have it be explicit vs implicit (closing a Window just means "I want to close this Window", it should not mean "I want this application to quit"). Another reason is consistency: with apps with multiple windows, the close=quit behavior is only desirable for the last one. So the behavior would be inconsistent depending on the number of open windows for that app (some of which might even be minimized and hence invisible). Finally, with Lion, you are not supposed to care if an app is open or not. Actually, it might even seem closed but still be loaded. This is because the OS is working behind the scenes loading and closing applications and will, to optimize responsiveness, loading time and memory use.