Comment 94 for bug 527458

Tooltips do not take input focus away from your current work flow, clicking the application icon does. For example, I can leave the tooltip up monitoring information the entire time I write this response.

The only time tooltips aren't the best approach is for mobile devices where the mouse is replaced by touching and there is no "hover" equivalent. I'm afraid that the motivation for this change may be a misguided effort to sacrifice desktop capabilities in hopes of a unified approach for mobile devices.

A simple fix to satisfy everyone is to allow applications to register an information/status panel and have the GUI show it according to user preferences. The user then decides if the information/status panel shows in the top part of the menu or as a tooltip. This creates no extra application development effort since only one object is being created and managed and it gives users the information in the manner they most prefer.

Does that not sound like a win/win?