GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 665436
Activities hot-corner is too sensitive
Last modified: 2012-10-27 13:25:45 UTC
I've testes GNOME-shell with an old woman who has never used a computer before.A lot of things are great but one big issue for her was that she maintained her mouse in the top left corner. As she was subtly shaking, she was constantly switching between activities and normal mode. Worst, she also took the reflex of clicking (don't ask me why). And she was hoovering the activities corner while clicking, resulting in lot of switches. I suggest the following heuristic: Once a switch has been done, another switch cannot happen if (0,5 sec elapsed || mouse moved of at least 100px) (values purely subjective). This would probably hide lot of unexpected switches.
Note there's already a timeout: if you click very very fast, nothing happens. It could probably be made a little longer without hurting anybody, as you never need to activate the overview and cancel it immediately. (Bug 663661 suggests a timeout for the activation of the hot corner, which is kinda related, but more controversial.)
I must admit that the hot corner seems to be a little too sensitive. There has been someone normal users who have found it a little annoying when it happens. It always happen when you're moving your mouse in an arc from left to right. There should be a little longer timeout so that it doesn't happen. I wonder if an extension to tweak this particular behavior is in order? That way we can test what would be the appropriate default value.
I can confirm that I personally find this v. annoying. Commonly the file menu is in the top left of any maximised app and I often find I've hovered over Activities and then have to re-find my app. I agree a configurable timeout would help. Possibly allowing a mouse click to cut it short.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 663661 ***