I can see the point of doing it both ways — The dock indicating that firefox is still hanging around even if it is locked up is far more useful than what happens on my Windows machine where I have to dig 10 levels deep to 1) Notice that firefox is actually still running and 2) close it.

I am not sure how best to handle the situation. I agree about the menubar problem not working well anymore — this is the case particularly on a multi monitor setup. You should not have to drag your cursor 5 linear feet to get to the File menu. It’s ridiculous. I think the best compromise would be to have a menu bar on each monitor. Iniitally I thought that the best idea would be to have a menubar showing the menu of the application active on that monitor, but then how do you address an application that has windows on multiple monitors? Where do you put the menu. I have come to the conclusion that the most utilitarian approach would be to replicate the same menubar across all monitors. It’s worth noting that such a utility could be written now to shadow the menubar — I wonder if someone will do it ?

In the same place where other systems put it when you close all the content windows: at the top of a little blank window.

Of course, most off the world considers applications that hang around when all their windows are closed to be badly behaved. This sort of behavior is a leftover from the fact that the Mac was basically single tasking for a long time.

It becomes even more annoying with multiple monitors when the menu bar for the image you are editing is on another screen and necessitates moving the mouse across two screens to chose menu items.

Right now I’m running Safari, Firefox, iTunes, and Fetch and only the Firefox window is open. Where will the menu be for iTunes with no open window?

On my Windoze XP box, when I close a window, the application is no longer running. What’s up with that?

Menu bars belong where they are. It works just fine the way it is.