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But surely these points all depend on your assumptions about what behaviour is "right"? I.e.: their inversions are also valid counterpoints if you think the window should be "heavier" than the tab.
* Clarity: Closing the tab and closing the window are two very different things - one means "I'm done with the current block of information, but this app is still useful to me", and the other means "this entire app is no longer of any use to me" - they are conceptually different things. At the moment this is being muddied by having the meaning of Ctrl-W change between these two things, depending on context.
* Easier to close all tabs without closing the browser (by holding Ctrl+W).
* Firefox supports multiwindow tabless browsing; ctrl-w closing the document but not the window is consistent with applications such as MS Office 2000and GEdit (GNOME text editor).* Currently, when I'm done with a tab, I cannot always safely press Ctrl+W, and assume that the right thing will happen (the tab will close, but the window will stay open). As I have to press a different shortcut to close a tab when it is the only one left, I sometimes accidentally press the Ctrl-W shortcut without realizing that it will close the window.* Blanking a tab is a useful action if you browse in single-window-mode (as the window is long-lived, whereas the tab is disposable - so we want the window to stick around, but need a way of clearing the content from the last tab when we are done with it, without closing the window)* For people who usually use tabs rather than windows, it's nice to have an easy-to-press shortcut (Ctrl+W) to close only the tab.
===Con===
===Pro having a pref===
* It would allow the user to select the best trade-off of the pros and cons above, at their discretion.
* There may be an element of the religious emacs-vs-vi / pro-life-versus-pro-choice debate to this: People who care tend to have a strong preference one way or the other, depending on their personal browsing style and which UI they think works best, and it may be that no amount of discussion will change that viewpoint. In particular, do you mostly browse with tabless single windows, or mostly with a multi-tabbed single window? Perhaps whichever mode you are closest to will drive your assumptions the most about expected behaviour.
===Con having a pref===
* It would introduce yet another preference, when the overall direction seems to be towards reducing the number of preferences.
==Question==
* If the use-case was changed so that:
** Ctrl+W will close the selected tab, as per currently, until only one tab is left in the current window.
** If the number of open windows was >= 2, then pressing Ctrl-W would close the current window.
** Otherwise, when only one tab in one window is left, Ctrl+W will blank the tab and clear session history (basically a quicker way of closing the tab and creating a new one).
:: ... would this be a suitable compromise? That would allow the tabless users to close windows (apart from the very last one), and it would allow the single-window-mode users to not have their one window closed.
