GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 73618
Discourage "Do you really want to exit?" dialogs when there is no data to save.
Last modified: 2020-12-04 18:20:10 UTC
Being lazy I'll just paste the text from my mail. > Now, as I see it, the idea with the exit confirmation dialog is that the > user has the last chance to avoid losing his work or data, which in this > case means his best game of tetris ever. But if there is no data to be > lost, is there any reason to ask for confirmation? If not, should the > guidelines recommend against such confirmations?
I agree with you Tommi... Further I think it would be nice if non-document-based-but-stateful-applications such as a Tetris game saved their state upon exit, similar to how they (should) currently do when called upon to exit with session management. This would completely eliminate any motivation to pop up an obnoxious "Do you want to exit?" alert.
So, let's add this to the HIG.
A main problem with adding this is that it seems that there's currently no chapter, where this fits in. While there is a section about save confirmation alerts in the Window chapter, I don't think that this is the right place to put this. (It should merely point to a chapter, where application exit behaviour is described.) Maybe we should add a chapter "Behaviour"?
The guidelines already recommend against a confirmation where there is nothing to be saved (in the section "Closing operation menu items" in the Menus chapter). I've just added a more explicit note along the lines of Seth's comment to the draft, in the same section. Agree either or both of these might belong elsewhere in the long run, but closing as fixed for now.