Comment 7 for bug 871985

To add the printer log into another desktop environment, even Unity works. Once the printer is added it will work in Gnome 3. But as far as I know you can't do it in Gnome 3 itself.

As far as a fix goes, my own interpretation doesn't leave me feeling confident that it will get fixed by Gnome devs any time soon but rather will have to wait until some future release, so maybe someone can create a replacement applet, or the Ubuntu devs can create a patched package that removes this .