Ubuntu phasing out the notification area

[brentaal]

Source: Canonical Design

Farewell to the notification area

Ubuntu is phasing out the notification area (a.k.a. ?system tray?), because of its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior. Many programs that previously used the notification area should use other notification mechanisms instead. Some notification area items will be replaced by various system status menus we?re introducing. For a few programs, it will be appropriate to use custom status menus.

Why we?re doing this

This story begins in 1990, when Microsoft released Windows 3.0 without an easy way to see what time it was.

There was a Clock application in Windows, and it could float on top of all other windows, but setting that option wasn?t obvious. And when the Clock was minimized, its icon showed the current time, but usually that icon was covered by the Program Manager window and any other maximized windows.

Microsoft fixed this during the design of Windows 95 by embedding a clock in the new taskbar. They also realized that people wanted a quick way of changing the system volume, so they placed a speaker control next to the clock. Then for people using notebook computers, they added a battery meter and PCMCIA status as well.

Together, these elements were controlled by a program called systray.exe. But at some point, Microsoft decided to make this mechanism generic, so that any application could use it. And so was born something called the notification area.

Credit: Wikipedia

Eventually geeks discovered the systray.exe name and started calling the notification area the ?system tray?. Microsoft has been struggling for 15 years now to get people to call it the ?notification area? instead, and largely failing.

In the first versions of Gnome, there was no notification area (though, infamously, there were five separate clocks). Building on a ?status dock? in Gnome 1.4, Gnome 2.0 introduced the status notification area, again with strict instructions to use it only for notifications ? only to find that people kept calling it the ?system tray? here too.

I think there are two basic reasons people keep using this name. The first is that the notification area has always been used for things that aren?t notifications. The first two items in the Windows implementation, clock and volume, were never ?notifications? in any meaningful sense. And in Gnome there?s a technical distinction between ?panel applets? (such as the clock and volume) and the notification area itself, but visually, that distinction barely exists.

The second reason is that the notification area isn?t actually good at delivering notifications. A tiny square icon, taking up less than 0.1 percent of a typical display, can communicate extremely simple, ignorable things ? like ?you have new messages? or ?your battery is charging?. But any information more abstract than that, such as ?software updates are available for this computer?, is a non-starter. This became clear when Windows 2000 introduced notification balloons that point at particular icons, explaining what they mean. These balloons have their own problems: in particular, they float on top of every other window regardless of whether you need to pay attention to them right now. (For that reason, we replaced Gnome?s equivalent notification balloons with Notify OSD bubbles that you can click straight through if you want to.)

The situation is made worse by developers who feel the urge to add a notification area icon for their application just because they can. In Ubuntu, many programs ? Rhythmbox, Banshee, VLC, Pino, and Pidgin, to name just five ? put items in the notification area that aren?t notifications at all.

Often this is a substitute for minimizing the window, to avoid cluttering the taskbar. For example VLC?s notification area has a menu with a ?Hide VLC media player in taskbar? item, and the AllTray utility exists for people who want ?to have a program always running, but easy to put out of the way?. That may make perfect sense to the developers of those individual applications. But looking at the operating system as a whole, it?s crazy. No competent designer, sitting down to design an operating system from scratch, would say to themselves ?I know, let?s have two completely inconsistent ways to hide windows?.

Microsoft, to their credit, have tried to rein in this kind of misuse of the notification area in Windows. But combined with their devotion to backward compatibility, that has caused its own problems. Windows XP hid persistent notification area items by default, and therefore also had a button for revealing them just in case you needed to access them. And in Windows Vista and 7, there is an entire dialog devoted to toggling which notification area icons should be hidden. It?s the OS equivalent of a car dealer including, with every car, a free roll of masking tape so you can cover up unwanted warning lights on the dashboard.

Complete blog post @ Canonical Design

[Inklin]

This problem exists in windows also, quite a few application developers throw icons into the Notification Area (A.K.A Tray :p )

It's a good change I feel, to remove it, and I wonder if that will be a change in windows 8 to expect too.

[Denis W. Veteran]

For the record, the dialog for hiding icons was there since XP, not Vista as the article claims (although 7 has a much improved dialog).

[Rob2687]

Good change. I find that I rarely ever use the notification area in either Ubuntu or Windows. In Ubuntu there aren't too many apps I use that place an icon there anyways. In both OSes I find myself disabling the tray icon anyways. The only two items I really needed/cared about in the notification area are the volume control and Network Manager.

[Syanide]

^ Pretty much the same. This also mirrors the Gnome 3 efforts of only system core applications using the "system tray" - Network Manager, Bluetooth, volume control, while other apps should have their own thing. I guess Ubuntu is the first one to address what that other thing should be. Good call imo.

[ViperAFK]

definitely like that idea. Not a huge fan of the tray.

[Lazure]

I never liked how things like messengers went into tray instead of the taskbar in windows. It's even worse now that Microsoft is trying to get away from the tray by introducing interactive thumbnails and jumplists to the taskbar button for running apps (such as the new live messenger in windows 7), but you still have other messengers like Yahoo still FORCING their way into your tray and creating an inconsistent issue (then again, Yahoo also breaks Aero for no reason other than to give you a stupid purple skin, too).

Either way, I definitely prefer the 'notification area' being ONLY for status and not as a means to interact with a program. Running programs that you restore/minimize should always go to the taskbar where intended.

Also, I always found the tray in the majorly used linux desktop environments to look really ugly, too. Often times you get giant inconsistent icons just randomly strewn about. At least in Windows, Microsoft made the distinction with smaller icons and using different graphics behind the icons to identify the tray area. Load up Ubuntu and look at the 'tray, it just looks like the same kinda icons that you would otherwise pin to the panel somewhere else!

[Growled Member]

I love the system tray and use it all the time. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

[Syanide]

Also, I always found the tray in the majorly used linux desktop environments to look really ugly, too. Often times you get giant inconsistent icons just randomly strewn about. At least in Windows, Microsoft made the distinction with smaller icons and using different graphics behind the icons to identify the tray area. Load up Ubuntu and look at the 'tray, it just looks like the same kinda icons that you would otherwise pin to the panel somewhere else!

Agreed. That's why I like their new approach with monochrome icons and the better use of messaging applet (which I really like):

Combined with non intrusive notification bubbles, this is not only better looking, but much more useful than having a twitter, IM and mail icons flashing on their own in the system tray.

[ceminess]

Good! I like the idea of combining icons and turning them into menus. I love the idea of getting ride of the notification area, and I think they are going about the right way to do this. it will improve the look of this area and I think will make things easier to use as well.

[bjoswald]

This could be either groundbreaking or disastrous for them. I hope they put a lot of thought into this.