Wonderful, that leaves 2 things on the top of my list for spaces: having to hover your mouse over the top left corner of a space and waiting until it shows the closing icon. And Safari deciding its better to switch to a space and open a window that was minimised there instead of just opening a new window in the space i'm currently in (even with the "switch to a space" setting turned off!) when 1 want to open a new tab.

If you hold command while you restore the window from the dock it will restore into the current space. I wish i knew how to make this the default. Getting whisked away to a random space is one of the most irritating issues. Like when you want a finder window for downloads and instead of a new window in the current space you get taken cross country to on thats already open.

Press Option to immediately show the close button

Thanks! Now I'm curious of all the places where there are still hidden Options key features that I haven't discovered yet. It's just everywhere, but so undiscoverable.

I have been dealing with the same issue and thought I was going crazy that the setting which purports to fix this exact behavior simply doesn’t work?

At least the setting does work in reducing the switching when you cmd-tab to an application with no open windows in the current space. But I think some of this annoying switching behaviour is application specific logic and they just didn't get it right with Safari, some other applications do get it right though.

For #1, holding the option key makes the x immediately appear on all of the spaces.