Comment 12 for bug 527458

Hi folks, Jono asked me to provide further clarity on the absence of tooltips. I marked it wontfix after a conversation with the reporter on a separate mailing list and didn't realise there was an ongoing dialogue here.

First, this is by design and not by accident. We may have a difference of opinion as the better behaviour, but the designed behaviour is not to show tooltips. Perhaps I will take a different view in future, but for the moment the decision is not to show tooltips on indicators.

Tooltips are a common device, but don't add an equal amount of value when used in different places. They also introduce potential problems: their rendering can be ugly and they can encourage "scrubbing". They are often poorly phrased and introduce additional translation requirements.

In the panel, where there are a relatively few icons and particularly little churn (the icons that are there, are there most of the time), it's my view that the benefits do not outweigh the costs, and so we'll turn tooltips off in Lucid for application and system indicators.

Tooltips are more appropriate inside applications, for example on toolbars where you can have an almost infinite variety of symbols, and may rarely see many of them. I think we could work on making them more useful and more attractively rendered there, and revisit the question of tooltips in the panel at another time.

I understand that there will be objections to this. We are taking something away. "Less is more" is a well established principle. We may be taking the wrong thing away here, but it's worth the experiment, and I'm also open to hearing *your* list of *better* things to be taking away :-)