Let me go out!

Some programs do not have the ability to easily exit them. Initially, this seems like an interface design error, but it seems that the creators of some programs simply believe that quitting the program is an optional and harmful opportunity.

And in fact, why give such a tool to the user? He’s stupid, he will come out by accident, and then he will get lost and will not return to the program. Therefore, you need to lock the user inside it, and if he wants to go out, then let him torment first, so as not to be bad.

Under the cat there are some discussions about why an easy exit function is necessary at this stage of software development, and a demonstration of a bad approach on the example of Skype for Android and Dr. Web for Windows.


In an ideal world, the exit function could be abandoned. But in the real world, programs do not work for free, but consume resources. This is especially noticeable on mobile devices when a suboptimal code begins to devour the battery with a wild appetite.

Take, for example, Skype for Android. He eats the battery fast enough, moreover, when you communicate through the computer, the phone constantly “gurgles”, signaling that a new message has arrived. Naturally, this is all annoying and I want to quickly exit this program as soon as it is no longer needed. But to do this, you need to perform a ritual of at least 5 tapas. Moreover, there will be no instant exit from the program, but exit from the network, after which the user will be taken to the login form, and not to the main screen. And the next time you have to log in again, and not just run the program.

I get the impression that the dreary exit is made with the expectation that users will not log out of Skype because of this and therefore will be much more online, thereby raising some indicators of accessibility through the system. I don’t know if this works for most users, but I myself now run this program only if absolutely necessary. And to quickly get out of it, I even downloaded the separate Stop Skype utility (the mere presence of such a utility already says a lot).

The second significant example is Dr. Web for Windows. The program seems to consider itself so important and necessary that the user simply has no right to stop it. More precisely, you can suspend it, but only after entering the administrative mode, from there choosing a stop for each component, entering captcha. And then manually you have to start all the components in a new way. And this is instead of just exiting the program and then logging in again.

Well, virus protection is an important thing, and you do not need to turn off protection, for example, to ordinary users on the corporate network or to your child / grandmother / younger brother. But an experienced user can decide when he needs an antivirus, and when not. Why does the program consider its opinion more important than the user's opinion?

Perhaps if the antivirus was an inconspicuous utility and only in the event of a threat made itself felt (what a home antivirus should be like), then the exit problem would not have been so acute. But after all, this infection periodically begins to devour completely the resources of one core. Moreover, he hides himself at the same time from the task manager, and one can only guess what happened by beginning to break away from the surface of the laptop table, which is about to fly away from the cooler on the jet stream.

All this led me to Dr. The web just had to be removed.

In general, I believe that the computer is the property of the user. And the user must decide when to exit which program. Programs that do not allow themselves to be easily exited are similar to guests who stayed at your place, do not understand hints, requests, etc., but leave only with a call from the police. And that is not always the case. Therefore, such a program causes irritation and the ban on exiting leads to the opposite effect: users begin to run the program as rarely as possible or delete it altogether.