[Ayatana] Is it time we killed "minimize to tray" ?

[Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've been giving this a lot of thought recently, well actually, I've
been irritated into giving it thought after not being able to find my
Rhythmbox window. I've been trying to work out why we have "minimize
to tray" functionality at all and all I can come up with is that it is
because the window-switcher applet is so horrible.

The window switcher applet has a bunch of problems, mainly that each
entry takes up too much space, and with an entry for each window you
fill up the space pretty quickly. When that happens you can't read the
titles of the windows, so you may have 5 Firefox windows and have to
hover over all of them to find the right one. You can, of course,
group them but even then that doesn't really help when each entry
still takes up a large portion of the space and requires a click to
access the windows in the group.

It's because of this shortage of space that I believe "minimize to
tray" exists. Minimize to tray is essentially "I don't need this
window cluttering up my taskbar, but I need to leave it running" and
the only reason I can think that normal bog-standard minimize isn't
suitable here is because the window-switcher is cluttered and the
window gets in the way.

I've been running DockbarX for a little while now, which groups
windows by their application icon, and displays a list of windows with
*full* titles when you hover that icon with the cursor. The massive
advantage of this is that you can open a hell of a lot of applications
before you run out of room, in fact right now I have 12 applications
(even more windows) running and I've not even filled half the panel
and I'm not on a widescreen resolution either. In this situation
minimize to tray is:

a.) Effectively the same thing
b.) A pain to work with because now there are two possible places that
your window could be minimized to

So, my suggestion is that we remove the minimize to tray functionality
from the indicator applet for apps outside the messaging menu and
replace the window-switcher with DockbarX or some other switcher which
follows a similar principle. I'm not saying DockbarX is ideal, but
it's a massive improvement on what we have already.

Luke.