Help! Old PC dog has to learn new Mac tricks

[JT Smith]

I think in this context it is less about the implementation and more about the user experience. Tabs and windows aren't the issue. It's about independence. Tabs are by nature bound to a single app instance/entity. But whether a window is part of a group of windows or stands alone has to do with how it works. The question is whether the window stands alone or is bound to the others in some way.

An example: I open a text file in Windows. Then another. They are completely separate from one another. With a Mac, opening the first file opens the app that then remains open even if I close both of the files. There are a set of menus at the top of the screen that work at the level of the app, not the individual windows.

 

[Algr]

Keeping a program open without documents is useful if the program is complex and takes a lot of time and memory to load. If you close one document and then open another, you won’t be reloading the program again.

Multiple instances of programs also seems like a waste of ram. Why load the same code twice?

Sure - if they were designed badly and buggy. And the same can be said for tabbed programs where multiple files are opened by one app: if it's not designed to handle that usage, it will break!

Badly designed programs are a fact of life. But if a program opens multiple documents then you can be certain that the programmers considered that situation. It isn’t something that just automatically happens. But if ANY program can be open in multiple instances, then you can’t be sure that the programmers have considered everything that could go wrong in this situation.

 

[DaveC426913]

Multiple instances of programs also seems like a waste of ram. Why load the same code twice?

With all due respect, just because it seems that way to you doesn't make it so. You don't know or speak for the habits of others, or the programs they use.

Many programs are not RAM intensive. Small utilities, such as Command Prompt are very handy to have open as multiple independent apps running. That's just one example.

 

[JT Smith]

You can be nearly certain that programmers have NOT considered everything for all but the most trivial of programs. But code that can be used simultaneously by multiple processes is an old idea. Do you think each app has a separate copy of the OS?

I don't know what Windows did or does now when a new "instance" is opened. I suppose one could monitor memory usage and see if it's a problem. I never had a problem twenty years ago when I was using Windows 2000 on what would now be unusably primitive hardware.