The windows standard exit is top right. If you make a windows app, it should follow this, unless you have a really good reason not to. The new firefox dev tools window thing has the close on the top left and it drives me mad.
Probably because many people complained that they accidentally killed their browser window several times.
The "standard" is stupid. It lacks careful thought and consideration. Dangerous buttons like 'Close' should have never been grouped with non-critical windowing buttons.
After using various windowing systems, you should start to wonder why Windows 7 uses the same windowing as Windows 95. This isn't 1994 when people were unfamiliar with computers and we transitioned from 3.1 to a radically different Windows 95 ... there's no reason for a 'Start' button and a myriad of other stupid artifacts left from Windows 95 to assist clueless people. The Windows interface is ancient with no future redesign in sight.
In my opinion, the task bar should go away, the tray should become a larger dock, and the windowing system should support tiling.
The Task BarThe task bar works well if you have relatively few windows. When you have too many windows then it becomes tedious to search through the task bar.
It would be nice if windows could be shaded (i.e. pulled up like a lamp shade) or iconified. Iconfication is a much more general concept than a task bar and allows you to place your iconified windows anywhere on the desktop.
The TrayC'mon, how is anyone supposed to read any useful information out of ultra small agents in the tray? The tray should be replaced by a dock (i.e. like Windows 7 widgets) or a dashboard.
TilingFor large displays, tiling is not essential, but for limited display screens (like tablets, netbooks, and phones) tiled window managers remove annoying overlap and windowing decorations that otherwise consume limited space. Android, for example, has a single tiled window manager (though for Tablets, it'd be nice if it supported more than just one window, maybe 2 or 3).
Tiling is also especially useful when you have several windows open as it enforces no-overlap. But, again, for large displays this isn't a big deal.
Tiling should be anisotropic (variably spaced grid).