When you launch the command, a viewer of some sort will normally be called after the compilation. If you are not using an embedded viewer, a new window will be opened every time.
If you are adjusting the look of your document, you might launch very often, and have many viewer windows open on your desktop; to avoid this confusion, you can activate the mode, that will prevent from launching a viewer.
This mode is of course useless with the embedded viewers, as you have to close them anyway to get back to editing the document and recompiling.