Comment 17 for bug 407621

mac_v, the key phrase in that quote of mine is "and doing nothing else". When I wrote that comment I did not know about the always-show-icons flag, and I was asking if such a flag existed. It does, and therefore setting menus_have_icons=false by default is a good step towards our goal of having fewer icons in menus. It may look a little odd for a week or two if you're used to icon-filled menus, similar to how 9.04's change in default font smoothing style might have looked a little odd for a week or two. So hang in there and see what you think after a few weeks.

Meanwhile, now that we have flicked the switch and set icons to be off by default, we need to fix relevant applications to match. You can help! Whenever you see a program that has menu items for objects where those menu items now don't include icons, report a bug on the program that it should use always-show-icons for those particular items. And conversely, whenever you see a program with icons on menu items for things that aren't objects, report a bug that the icons should be removed.

Examples of menu items that count as objects, and should therefore have icons: applications, documents (including any recent documents in a "File" menu), disks, partitions, folders, bookmarks, history items, IM accounts, IM statuses, user accounts.

Examples of menu items that don't count as objects, and should therefore *not* have icons: openable windows (e.g. "Edit" > "Preferences" or "Go" > "Edit Bookmarks"), toolbars (e.g. "View" > "Toolbars" > anything), actions (e.g. "Go" > "Back").

Unlike menus in Windows, whether a menu item has an equivalent toolbar button is irrelevant to whether the menu item should have an icon.

One bug that someone should report, if it hasn't been done already, is to ensure that the change made to Firefox trunk in <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504275> is also applied to the version of Firefox that ships with Karmic.