Comment 53 for bug 527458

I would like to add my voice to those asking for the previous behaviour to be reinstated.

I can see the place for "less is more" in terms of removing screen clutter and user interactions that do not "add value". Tooltips that tell you what something does seem to be a candidate for this and the argument for self-explanatory icons is strong.

However, as a previous comment says, there are very few universally understood icons, and something that is an obvious icon to me might not be in another culture.

Given that the "clutter" only appears at the users request, I would rather have a few redundant tooltips than have a group of users unsure what an icon is for and with no easy way to find out.

I think that where tooltips are actually providing status information rather than "what am I" the case for reinstating them is even stronger. The ability to check on the status of some aspect of the system without focusing away from the current application is an important interaction for many users. In my case, like many others, it is minutes of battery life remaining. If we can find a better way to provide this information, without requiring more clicks or changes of application focus then great, but please can we wait until we have found a better solution before removing the 90% solution we already have.

Finally, doing this in a LTS seems a high-risk strategy to me. I can see that we don't want the LTS to be stuck with an obsolete user interface paradigm and that increases the pressure to introduce some things that might have benefited from being introduced in Lucid+1 (where they could be dropped in Lucid+2 if they don't work out). However, I am also worried that if we introduce things in an LTS then there will be a great deal of reluctance to go back to the old way even if the new way doesn't work out.