Comment 159 for bug 332945

Thanks to everyone who's participated in this bug discussion and related threads. As a result, a number of changes were made in 9.04 pre-release. There is a gconf key which allows people to have a system tray icon visible when updates are available. The behaviour of the update manager was changed so that it doesn't pop up but instead opens minimised, and only on a weekly basis unless a security update is present (as opposed to another kind of update).

I think the system tray is heavily overused, and abused, by many applications, and as part of our design initiative we are working to reduce that. I think it's important that we not treat the OS specially, that we work to the same guidelines we want app authors to follow, which is why we aimed to change this OS-update behaviour first. We must lead, not follow, and lead by example too. It was expected that we would run into tough problems, but bringing the full weight of the community to bear on candidate solutions would be the best way to attempt to resolve them. A lot of the discussion here was in that spirit - finding smart solutions to the challenges presented, so thank you all.

I'm marking the bug wontfix on the basis that we are confident the behaviour as at 9.04 release is a good one. I wouldn't be surprised for the conversation to continue though I do ask that it continue in a good spirit. If significant data shows this to be a suboptimal choice in future, we will revisit the point, but for now the question is settled.