Apply\cancel buttons in settings

Did you guys notice how more and more programs\websites are getting rid of the "apply" and "cancel" buttons? Now when you're done playing around with the settings you can just close the window. Naturally, I miss that final touch and sometimes I wonder "so did it save my changes or what?". Well, that's probably a question of time and eventually you can get used to such things. But still, do you guys think it's a good idea to remove that stuff? For example, without the "cancel" button you can't quickly take back a bunch of unsaved changes, which can be annoying.

UI simplification, in cases where it isn't needed, or hiding things that used to be in plain sight, all often for the 'ease' and 'convenience' for idiots who wouldn't know what they were doing in the first place and pissing people like me off in the process. If your UI has me staring at the screen for more than 10 seconds to figure out where everything is you're doing it wrong.

I think "apply" and "cancel" are needed no matter what. As you said, there are misclicking from time to time. Sometimes you don't even know where did you click at and change something by accident. Another thing is definitely the feeling of completion.

From another standpoint, I don't think accessing the database to change a value every time the user changes something is good. Should put them in batch and commit at the end to apply all the changes and access only once to the database. However, this is just my thought because no one cares about 0.00X second lost, I guess.

If really want to remove the apply button, I think there should be at least a UI hint to let the user know something was changed.

Funny that most option menus in games have been working like that since forever. So it cannot have been such a big problem to begin with.

Even if there aren't any confirmation buttons, I'm fine as long as there's some kind of confirmation message. On the plus side, the lack of such buttons means less time taken for configuration.