It drives me nuts on Windows that when I close FireFox the entire APPLICATION closes! I just wanted to close the window. Now when I start it again / open a new window, I have to enter my LastPass credentials. And pay the boot penalty.
IMHO, a multi-window app should not exit when I close the last window.
Linux Desktops and Windows both do this, macOS does not.
On Linux' Firefox, this does not seem to be the case. I just confirmed by closing a window with a few dozen tabs, and my other windows were perfectly fine. Same goes for VS Code, IDEA, Ghidra, Tilix, etc. This might be Wayland-specific behavior, but closing one window does not appear to take the rest of the apps with it (unless they were a child process).
But you always need ONE child window open or it will exit entirely.
MacOS has a different approach, where the application top level process keeps running, even if it has no windows, but this requires some sort of GUI element to communicate with application.
That is nonsense. It is just a different model and the model Mac users have been used to since the 80ies. When I close a window/document, I often want to another document with the same application, so why close it? If I want to close an applications, I can use Cmd-q. Moreover, their visual presence is not gone, such an application is still in the Dock and in the app switcher.
And why do I care if an application continues running? If it hasn't been used for some time, macOS compresses its pages. And inactive native applications will be put in App Nap, which freezes the application, so that it doesn't use system resources until it is activated again.
There is a third space on mac, different from a menubar, called "dock". In the old days it was integrated into the main persistent menu bar, but was removed maybe in the early 2000's. Personally I prefer one menubar, but at least I can hide the dock.
EDIT: "dock" not "launchpad". Duh.
And with Firefox, it would make the "Restore all tabs on open" not work, since clicking X didn't close the app, and thus pressing Firefox again would just create a new empty window. For it to work, I had to not use the red button, but cmd + q or the menu bar.