GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 615361
bring back the icons in overview mode
Last modified: 2012-04-10 12:47:35 UTC
Created attachment 158369 [details] screenshot - can you spot liferea in less than a second? what about gedit? The attached screenshot illustrates a problem with gnome-shell's overview mode when you are dealing with many windows: - they pretty all look similar at some point (big white rectangle box) - their thumbnails are too small to discern details - it becomes harder to spot the app you are looking for GNOME Shell used to show the application icons on top of the thumbnails. I thought that it was a very good design decision.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, you are using a version that is too old and not supported anymore. GNOME developers are no longer working on that version, so unfortunately there will not be any bug fixes for the version that you use. By upgrading to a newer version of GNOME you could receive bug fixes and new functionality. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain a newer version of GNOME. Please feel free to reopen this bug if the problem still occurs with a newer version of GNOME.
The request is not obsolete, the overview still have small thumbnails of running applications, and Jean-François Fortin Tam's observations are thus still valid. But I believe there was a design decision leading to the removal of application icons on top of thumbnails, and the shell is working as expected.
I agree that this is still a big usability problem. Even when you can spot the difference, it takes time. The proof that it is needed is that an extension for that: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/60/overlay-icons/ I think that, instead of an extension, it should be part of the default feature (maybe with a smaller icon, in a corner of the thumbnail, I don't know). It would also worth investigating if those icons could be put on the thumbnails in the workspace switcher, where the problem is even more critical (thumbnails are even smaller) Could this bug be reopened ? (the title could be modified to "It's hard to distinguish between app thumbnails")
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 634599 ***