Apple didn’t move the close button. It has been at the left end of the titlebar for the entire existence of the Macintosh—since before MS-Windows existed, and 11 years before it grew a dedicated close button. In gconf language the Mac System 4 through 7 arrangement would be “close:maximize”. The Mac OS 8 through 9 arrangement would be “close:shade,maximize” (except that GNOME doesn’t support a shade button). In Mac OS X they did away with the shade button (leaving that function to double-clicking the titlebar), added a minimise button next to the close button, and moved the maximise button to form one cluster—with a nice sane order (minimise is more similar to close than maximise is.

In MS-Windows versions prior to Win95 (4.0) and WinNT4, double-clicking the window-control menu (on the left, ooh) was the closest it had to a close button—a method which not only still usually works, but is an option in many unixoid window managers. In gconf language it would be “menu:minimize,maximize”.

When Microsoft eventually added a close button, they ridiculously put it next to (indeed in the position formerly occupied by) the control with the most contrary functionality—maximise. (I can’t tell you how many expletive-rich occasions i accidentally closed a window instead of maximising it, when i first went from Win3.1 to Win98.) This yielded the now familiar, annoyingly middle-endian, min,max,close cluster that most late-’90s Windows users lemmingly accepted without question, along with absurdly frequent system hangs and crashes. (I was delighted to find that both KDE and GNOME let me fix that nonsense.)

Here are the links to the themes.

Ambiance_R (Ambiance Right Side)
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Ambiance_R+%28Ambiance+Right+Side%29?content=123927

Radiance_R (Radiance Right Side)
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Radiance_R+%28Radiance+Right+Side%29?content=123931

I hope you find these beneficial and enjoy them.

- Jack Thomas

The problem is that the right side now is pretty empty which doesn’t look nice. Having been used to the buttons on the right side, isn’t the only reason to keep them there. Some have pointed out, that the buttons now are in very close proximity to the window menu, which makes it more likely to miss the menu and accidently hit “close”. Remember: on mac, there isn’t this problem, since mac places the menu bar at the top of the screen rather than on the top of the menu.

One small remark yet: three of the example layouts you presented are in essence the same. The only one standing out (until now) is macosx and that – as i explained – fits in the general layout in macosx. So actually, there haven’t been much variance in button placement.