Comment 3 for bug 616447

Personally, I find the current behaviour troublesome. For instance, I select Quit from the launcher for Pidgin, and it closes windows but leaves processes running (and then people think I am around when I am not). And when the windows are gone, there is no way to know that Pidgin is still running, since it has been removed from panel (in previous Ubuntu releases it left an icon in the systray and you could quit from there, but now it is hidden out of sight in the messaging menu).

Perhaps Pidgin is a particularly problemmatic case of the designed behaviour, because it is also running up against the fact that it has been banned from the panel. But the combination means that we have behaviour that doesn't work at a pretty basic level. (I.e., when the user says they want to Quit the app, it doesn't do so, although every indication to the user is that it has quit).

I suspect that the common case is that when a user (particularly a non-power user) selects quit from the Launcher, they want to actually quit. I suspect that the intention of "close the windows but leaves the daemon or background processes running" is something of a corner case, or at least limited to a small number of apps that could be special-cased.