Hi hi, I may be the only one who hasn't figured this out yet, but how do I close browser or app screens?--I mean ending them, not just moving them out of the way. When I hit the home button, it doesn't stop the programs from running. I downloaded the close everything app, but there's got to be a better way... any suggestions? Thanks!
Basically in Android, you have no control over whether an app is open in the background or not - and you don't need to. Android handles it for you, automatically and transparently.
When you switch from the browser to the home screen, the browser may or may not still be open in the background. Android will leave that process in memory so long as there is memory available. When Android needs more memory, it will ask the browser to save its state (i.e. the URL of the page that you were viewing) and quit. Next time you open the browser, if the browser wasn't still in memory, it will be re-run and its state will be restored. In general, you won't know if an app is open in the background or not, and you don't need to. The quitting, state saving, and state restoring is transparent for most apps. For the browser, it's a bit less transparent because you can see the page reload if you open the browser and it wasn't already in memory. Also, many apps are split into multiple processes, e.g. a front-end gui and a back-end server. When you are no longer viewing the gui, that process will quit, but the server process may continue running if it has work to do. That's how the music player works, for example. It's up to the app designer to use Android's process management framework correctly. I think all of the apps I use do a good job of this.
Process management in Android works remarkably well, and I'd recommend that you just not think about it.
If you have some compelling reason to force an app to quit, you can use Taskiller. But I would recommend against that, as some apps won't function correctly if killed.