Comment 130 for bug 527458

Trying to get constructivity back in this thread:
I can understand and agree to the intention to reduce system tray icons.

The reason why the system tray came up was (from my understanding): Some applications run continuously and "pollute" the task bar as they occupy a lot of space while not being of interest most of the time. Only in certain event cases they are needed. Some of them have a status or display notifications from time to time and others are just kept there to have them in memory for later faster reuse. That said: I definitely do NOT like the approach done in Windows 7 (displaying everything in the task bar whether it is really started or not). The approach of Windows dealing with the system tray by letting you simply decide which Icons you want to be displayd always and which only if something happend (or even never) I like better.

Samples: Skype should be running always so that co-workers can reach me when I am online. However, I am not interested in that application yet. When an event happens I want to see it and if I double click on an incoming call I get (and want) that particular event/window in the taskbar as it gets a current task (the call or chat). I also want to have Shutter running in the background because on startup it takes a while to load the plugins. As I do need Shutter often, but then just for two or three screenshots, I like having it in the notification area even if it never displays any notification or status. KeePassX is also an application I need running in the background because it offers the CTRL+ALT+X hotkey posting login data to my web forms but never displays notifications or status.

So far so good - System tray good idea. Problem with that is twofold:

a) A lot of applications consider themselves to be so important to add themselves to the system tray. Under Windows I have seen a lot of graphic or notebook touchpad drivers adding themselves to the system tray which is completely stupid because you configure those to match your preferences and then never touch it again (maybe you don't touch it neither that first and only time because you go with the defaults). Fortunately it is not so bad under Linux.

b) Due to the fact, that with the rising of social networking and plenty of Instant messaging tools + social networking sites the amount of interesting background applications rises.

Solution-Attempt:
The idea to collect all those messages within a generic notification system is very good: I also don't go to different news websites for years and only use an RSS reader. So having a similar type of syndication is good. I agree with Mark and his team that something should be done to solve the problems by creating a single notification system.

But the important thing that is overlooked IMHO: You need to differ between time critical messages plus applications/status you simply want to have "at hand" and other just "FYI" type messages. If my laptop battery goes empty in a few minutes then this is a high priority information that is more important for me that - let's say facebook friends chatting me. Also a time critical information can be if Ubuntu One finished syncing because I might want to shutdown my laptop (already late to leave the office) and access that data later at home.

One idea to solve this could be: Have a single notification application that the applications can talk to where the applications can drop a message including a message type (Critical, Error, Warning, Information for example) and priority (even an error can have a lower priority - for example if currently a syncing error that gets retried in a minute and only if 3 retries failed then drop the sync error with a higher priority). If then the user can decide for each application with what priority a notification popup or sound should appear and for which only an indicator in the system tray, the user can decide what is important. But it should also be possible for the user to define particular applications to display their (original) very own icon in the system tray. Sample: Skype is for me the far most used IM - all the others could be syndicated, but Skype I want to keep separate.

I also must say that for me the system tray overloading never has been really an issue. As I hardly can handle too much applications in parallel and do not use all installed application each day I can imagine a maximum of 9 icons in the notification area which is less then what I have in my quickstart area (see attachment where I started all the most used tray applications - usually I have 6 icons there).