Comment 85 for bug 527458

Some time ago, the decision was made to remove icons from menus.

If consistency with "menu-like" behavior is a priority for the indicator-applications, then:

1) They shouldn't have icons, they should just be text.
2) Their contents shouldn't have icons, or sliders for that matter (as in the case of the volume control).

If those are acceptable deviations (and they're HUGE deviations from the normally expected behavior of a menu), I'd expect that tooltips are a sufficiently small deviation, given that:

1) There's no other proposed way of getting at some of this information
2) Other "menu" objects, especially the main application/places/system menus, still have tool-tips.