It was perfectly reasonable for an application to open with no windows because the application always had a visible menu bar at the top of the screen. In the earliest days of the Macintosh, you could only run one application at a time. Stackexchange user wrosecrans outlined the history nicely back in 2010: From its inception, macOS has been process oriented, meaning that when you close a window the application stays open. The Mac way of doing things is older than the Windows way, because macOS has been around longer. In a way, this is like asking English people why they have an accent. Keep doing this, holding Cmd, until all the apps you want closed are gone. Keep holding Cmd, then use the arrow keys to select different applications, pressing “Q” to instantly close the currently selected application. If you want to close a bunch of applications at once, press Cmd+Tab to bring up the application switcher. It will take a bit of getting used to at first, but soon this will become second nature.Īlternatively, you can right-click its dock icon, then click “Quit”. If you want to actually close an application, click File > Quit in the menu bar, or press Cmd+Q while using the application. But in general, apps tend to follow these two trends for each platform. So neither operating system sticks to its given paradigm 100 percent, because each approach makes sense in certain contexts. On Windows, meanwhile, many applications keep running in the system tray after you close their windows. Some Mac applications, including System Preferences, close completely when you close their window. There are exceptions to these rules, both on the Mac and on Windows systems. Calendar and Photoshop, meanwhile, are not open, which you can see by the lack of a dot.

You can also see which applications are currently open by glancing at the dock. The dots below the Finder, Safari, and other icons above indicate that the applications are open.

Finder close all windows but focus