GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 107243
Window icon different for panel and desktop
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
The window applet icon changes when the active (key focus) window changes. When switching between the desktop and the panel (by clicking on them for instance), the icon also changes. This behaviour is very confusing, as most users do not view the panel and the desktop as different applications. In fact, none appear in the window list, and separating the icons from one another serves no purpose. Instead of displaying different icons for different parts of the desktop, a single icon should be used. The icon change behavior has been filed in a separate bug report (#87831), which will make this issue irrelevant if resolved. This issue may be resolved by simply swiching an icon, however, so a fix to this could be much less intrusive.
But there is a difference - they *are* two different window focus locations. This would also mean that they would have the same window icon in the Ctrl-Alt-Tab popup - having a different icon is very useful for people switching between the panel and the desktop.
Ok, so the keyboard navigation differences motivates having different icons? In that case, we should also have different icons for the two default panels (top and bottom). They have different functionality and support different keybindings. One cannot see which one is going to be selected with Ctrl-Alt-Tab by other means than looking at the window outline. The more I think about this, though, the more I agree with #87831. Changing the top-right icon on active window only cause confusion. Especially since the drop-down list only includes windows from the Alt-Tab list, whereas the icon can also change to one of the icons in the Ctrl-Alt-Tab list.
Okay, I'm going to mark this as a duplicate of #87831. I tend to agree with that too. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 87831 ***