Comment 100 for bug 332945

Mark said:

>> We all are complaining because we feel that pop-under or whaterer are
>> just wrong, and we want ubuntu to be perfect :)
>
>And I see your point! We've been focused on the idea that the action
>itself should be immediately accessible to the user (rather than a
>notification followed by a clickable panel icon followed by the action
>:-)). But the windows itself could be minimised. Let's explore that. I
>think it may be too late for Jaunty but I'll see what we can do

Please take this as constructive criticism, as it's meant that way.

My wife and I have windows on our laptop, but we rarely boot into it since we run Ubuntu all the time. It's the windows that came with pre-installed on each machine so it has a lot of crapware that came from the manufacturer. When we do boot into it, not only do we have a bloated notification area, but we also have to click through several pop-up and pop-under windows (both!) that these applications bombard us with asking us to upgrade our virus definitions, our java version, or whatever. And because they're all loading more DLL's to show a full GUI instead of a notification, they slow the machine down. Often we start doing the thing we need to get done, and get interrupted by another one. If they just blinked away in the notification area, they'd be a lot less annoying.

Plus, we're often puzzled to close an app in the foreground and find an update window sitting behind it.. we'll stare at it and go "wait, I didn't launch that update app, what's going on?". This type of behaviour makes the user feel they're not in control of their own computer. Running interactive programs that the user didn't ask us to run is a confusing and bad paradigm, whether the window starts minimized or not. We often joke about how glad we are Ubuntu doesn't do that.

You know what else is annoying? the annoying windows popup 'reboot now or remind me in 15 minutes" after you install updates. Much more intrusive then the Intrepid reboot notification. Is that the type of thing we're moving to for the reboot notification as well?

I understand that Mark is making a usability argument that he wants the action to be available immediately. But I don't understand what's so wrong with the 'Hey, I see I've got updates, I should click on the icon and install the updates'. How is that different then the normal 'Hey, I need to write an email, I'll click on the email icon to write my email'? I don't see a difference. Yes, we all agree the notification area was abused, but it was designed for just this case.

Actually, take the email analogy further: Imagine if a mail notification applet checked for new mail, didn't actually tell you when you had new email, and then launched your heavyweight email app every 5 hours regardless of what you're doing (unless you got a 'high priority mail', then it would launch immediately).

It also appears that this bug report has lost the fact that now there is NO notification that there are (non-critical) updates, allowing the user to decide when to install them. Instead, Ubuntu has (arbitrarily, though I assume user configurable in the future) when it will run the update manager and force the issue the issue on an unsuspecting user.
If they decide to not do the updates at that time (after closing this random window that appeared on their desktop they didn't ask for), then there's no persistent notification that there are pending updates. I guess not until the next interval. I've been waiting for updates since I upgraded to jaunty, and now I know why I wasn't seeing them. Some people are interested in non-critical updates too.

By focusing solely on the 'I want the user's action to be available immediately when the event happens' perceived problem, we've completely removed the persistent reminder. You've essentially dictated temporarily when you want updates installed, regardless of whether user wants to (or can, think modem users who actually -can't- update from a network at certain times). Without a persistent notification mechanism, they're likely to forget to update the next time they are on a network.

(one thing my wife just pointed out, if you close the update window because you're not ready to install updates at that time, then now you've got to go digging through a menu to launch it again, instead of having an icon readily available on your desktop).

Bottom line is, the goal of improving the use of the notification area is a noble one, but you've taken away the proper uses of the area and created a major usability regression. Running visible programs the user didn't ask for leads the user confusion and frustration, and the feeling like we're, frankly, back at Bug #1.