Return to Revisions

##X has never meant exit, but there's a reason for the confusion##

X has historically been overloaded to mean two different things:

1. Delete an item. For example:

   

2. Close or Dismiss a window. This is not the same as exiting an app but historically, hitting the X button almost always resulted in an application exiting, so that is why users sometime confuse the two:

• Historically, single-threaded operating systems and modally-oriented applications didn't have active background processes like Skype does, so when an application window was dismissed (not minimized with -), the logical thing to do was to exit the application.
• This is why the confusion has arisen over time (aka it's correlation not causation).
• Here are a few examples of why even historically, X never meant Exit:
  • Historical versions of Microsoft Windows sometimes had X icons on dialog boxes to dismiss them.
  • Both historically and today, X is used for in-frame documents (e.g. in Microsoft Word) to close a document window but not to Exit an application.

##Today, X means the same thing##

When correctly used, the X meaning should still mean Close or Dismiss. For some applications, it makes sense for to exit the application when the window is closed/dismissed. For others (e.g. Skype, anti-virus firewall), it makes sense for the application to keep running in the background when the window is dismissed. So nowadays, Close does not always lead to an exit, but the X idiom is still the same.