The 'Reopen windows' feature is a complete crapshoot on what the app actually does when it comes back up, so I never use it. It has always been half baked on OSX, and seems to also add weird complexity.
Honestly what is the benefit? A computer is off, on, or sleeping. All of that worked fine for years. I don't get it.
> The 'Reopen windows' feature is a complete crapshoot on what the app actually does when it comes back up, so I never use it.
I do use it, frequently. So frequently that I have designated Force Quit as my “turn it off and on again” mechanism for nearly everything for years. Granted my daily usage app catalogue is minimal, and I agree some aspects of normal behavior are less predictable than one might wish (the article covers those). So I respectfully defer to your experience and decision not to use it. In my experience it’s as reliable as Quit or Shutdown for every app I use, and sometimes more reliable for misbehaving apps which have custom state saving functionality. VSCode in particular comes to mind, it restores undo/redo history when force quit and falling back to built in system behavior but comes up with no history if I so much as agree to a software update.
> Honestly what is the benefit? A computer is off, on, or sleeping.
The benefit is that, excepting certain details most use cases rarely encounter, the computer and apps running on it have only one state instead of three: resume where you left off. For active multitasking, that means waiting for volatile storage. For “App Nap”, Force Quit, and crashes that means waiting for non-volatile storage. For reboots and logins that means waiting for a bunch of other apps and services to resume. But if the app uses the functionality even semi-faithfully, you’re only waiting for it to become responsive again, then it resumes as if it were in the same state you left it. Regardless of whether your computer or even your app was on, off, or sleeping.
Again, not saying it’ll work that way for you and I’ll defer to your experience. But if you want to know how other people benefit from it, my experience is I can kill almost any process on my computer or even force reboot, and the only consequence before I resume what I was working on is how long I might have to wait.
I force quit textedit as a way of saving. Then I don't have to go in and name my 20 open documents. Every few months I'll manually save or delete my files. But it's interesting that force quit is more convenient and less annoying than "save"
I never understood why TextEdit just doesn’t silently exit and open all the unsaved windows the next time. I thought that was the point if this whole feature? (That’s exactly how Sublime Text implements it and I love it. I use a lot of unsaved scratch buffers for temporary notes).
I did! I use Force Quit because it mostly does reopen windows. Sometimes it’s more reliable, and it’s almost always faster, than waiting for an app to quit “normally”. I mostly trust the automated behavior more than I trust individual apps.
I'm with you. Besides the crap shoot, generally the only reason I restart my macbook is because the particular combination of poor cooling, tabs leaking memory, video conferencing software somehow maxing out all cores and Spotlight's indexer apparently rebuilding from scratch have made my experience so awful I've just held the power button for 5s to kill everything and restart. (Side note: why doesn't Mac OS have a "just shutdown already" button like Windows?)
The last thing I want is for all that crap to load back up on restart all at once.
It always seems to work for me properly? People want this feature so they can restart their computer without losing their Safari tabs. I used it today when updating my computer. I didn't have to save my tabs because Safari just brought them all back automatically.
I don’t think tabs are lost when you restart safari; at least there’s a different setting to reopen tabs when safari starts. Different than reopen windows.
In Safari it's part of the window restoration setting. There are options to reopen those tabs if it fails (in the History menu) but getting your tabs back when you quit Safari without closing a window is part of the native state restoration.
Presumably, they mean that they want windows to reopen after a controlled shutdown (when they likely quit and clean up applications before doing so); while they don't want windows to reopen after an uncontrolled shutdown (when that results in dozens of windows reopening from 12 different apps, all at once, bringing the system to a crawl for 10+ minutes.)
The default behavior was to triple everything, which resulted in 20-30 minute boot cycles. I’m not exaggerating, the boot loop would swap to disk and there she blows
My father-in-law was complaining about his Mac being incredibly slow, even after a reboot.
Turns out, he had a lot of programs running despite not having a document open, and that "reopen window" function was causing them to all reload on startup. Browser, word processor, tax software, whatever else. All on his aging Mac that I'm fairly sure only has 4 GB of RAM.
Preview works this way on Macs for some reason. Close all my preview windows and the app itself disappears from the app switcher. I assume it self-quits.
I use it whenever I have to restart my work laptop for a system update, or because my company's sketchy VPN client stopped working again. Saves me quite a bit of time and effort
I am legit curious what the reason for the downvote is here. I don't think there's anything personal/shitty, and this is an objectively true statement answering the "what's the point?" comment.
Honestly what is the benefit? A computer is off, on, or sleeping. All of that worked fine for years. I don't get it.