Window Misbehavior

You know what drives me nuts? When you close a window and it doesn’t close… it just sits there mocking you with it’s continued existence. It’s probably saving something to disk or sending statistics to its mothership or maybe calculating the next chunk of bitcoin hashes. Who fucking knows, it just doesn’t close. You’re clicking furiously on that red X in the corner but it’s still there, laughing at the futility of your desires.

How long does it take to kill a process exactly? Clicking that window close button should not be giving control over to the window you’re trying to kill, it should immediately close the window against its will and give the app about 3 seconds to finish something up before the OS completely kills the process and reclaims it’s memory without mercy.

It’s to the point where I find myself doing a task manager kill more often than just closing a window normally. If you allow an app to misbehave it will misbehave. This is one of the reasons why I’m looking forward to Windows 8. Win8 apps adopt the model closer to phones and ios, where apps are sandboxed and at the mercy of the OS rather than the other way around. Apps get frozen and killed at the users whim and nearly instantly. It’s these types of issues that render the old desktop obsolete in my mind (along with modal dialogs).

Inspired by this rant on splash screens and apps misbehaving while opening: http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2012/02/splash-screens-sloth.html

Author: justinmchase

I'm a Software Developer from Minnesota.

2 thoughts on “Window Misbehavior”

  1. If it is possible to make an app appear to be fully running for less CPU than it takes to actually run the full app, why would we ever want to run the full app at all if we can do already do everything we want with fakeout mode. If windows paint does everything you need, why are you using photoshop.

    Likewise, if it is possible to make an app appear to close, why ever really close an app.

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