Comment 249 for bug 332945

Just to give my two cents on the subject: I'm in favour of keeping the
notification icon for a simple reason. Someone (I don't remember if
Mark or someone else) mentioned, from what I got, that the
notification area has been used by applications, and to avoid
confusion we should remove it from there. So, the problem is not the
area itself, it's the applications! The notification area is there to
give notifications, if the applications are using it too much then
(using this argument) the applications should be using something else,
not the notifications. This is the same as changing your address
because you are receiving too much junk mail.

My suggestion (and I know this isn't something to be decided in a
couple of days) is to keep two areas, one for applications that run in
background and want to hide from the window list, like pidgin, network
manager, skype, power manager, bittorrent, etc. (citing the list in my
desktop right now), and another area for notifications, like updates,
new mail, or whatever else needs my attention at some point in the
near future (I liked the "patient notifications" mentioned before). If
someone wants to keep both together, just put both areas in the same
place.

But I'm in favour of an option to keep the notification icon, so that
everyone can choose the behaviour. If you think usability dictates the
use of a pop-under window, keep this option default, but I'm used to
that, as is a lot of people around, and I'd love to keep it there. And
this is the behaviour that people migrating from some other major OSs
are used to.

Well, that's my opinion. I didn't read all the two hundred and
something comments on the subject (I over-read the eighty first and
been following the last couple of days), but I think this could be
considered.

--
Jonatan Schroeder, MSc.
Teaching Assistant, PhD Student
UBC - Computer Science
<email address hidden> - http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~jonatan

"The box said: Requires MS Windows or better, then I installed GNU/Linux!"