Alt-Tab of a minimized window only shows icon

This is a better way of doing it , than the bug >
https://bugs.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bug/387828

This is because when you minimize the window it is completely gone. There is nothing to show a thumbnail of.

@Travis Watkins:
I agree with you.

But the present behavior is not very helpful, when several windows of nautilus/any other app are switched using Alt+Tab , only showing of the icon is not ideal.
Rather if the switcher shows the thumbnail, the windows are easily identifiable, than reading the title.

I believe this is achievable,
To test:
1: Open firefox, and open a page which loads slowly.
2: Minimize the window. Now we see the thumbnail used in the minimize animation is of the present un-loaded page.
3: Wait for the page to load , now restore the window, Note the thumbnail used in the restore animation is of the page fully loaded.

The new thumbnail can be refreshed similarly when the user uses Alt+Tab.

The same can be done for window preview also.

Do you think this is possible or do you foresee any problems?

The thumbnail plugin hooks into the minimize window event and takes a snapshot of the window at that time. This uses a lot of memory as it is storing a raw pixmap (1MB per window for a RGBA 512x512 thumbnail). To do this in the switcher plugin would cause the default setup of compiz to suddenly use a lot more memory which would hurt users with low end machines.

Also, each plugin would have to store its own copy of the thumbnails. You could modify core to store them but then you have to at least rebuild every plugin as you've changed the core ABI and you'd certainly have to modify every plugin you wanted to use such functionality. Due to the compiz core ABI version being the date the ABI was changed this makes it hard to tell the difference (what if we change ABI the same day upstream does?).

Even if such a patch was made every small change to core or one of the plugins using this new feature would probably require tweaking the patch. Such a significant change would also mean we could not forward a lot of bugs upstream due to the differences. Also, when (if?) the next compiz release comes out you'd have to completely rewrite the whole patch anyway.

This is not a bug we can fix in Ubuntu without upstream support and upstream does not like your proposed solution (they used it in the beryl days and saw all the problems it caused). Even if we decided it was worth the effort to diverge from upstream in this case it is certainly not a papercut bug as it would require a lot of design and coding work to make it work correctly.

Since the papercuts invalid list is growing , some good ideas are getting lost , hence assigned it to Ayatana[after discussing with David Siegel] for further consideration.

Even Windows7 has now been able to do this > http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=7873 < the devs in the forum say that this needs some changes in X , just needs some attention.

Bug is being moved...

Won't Fix in papercuts , but is tagged "ayatana" to be overseen in Ayatana project

Is there any news on this?
I filed a bug report against Xorg, seeing this problem from the Compiz scale plugin point of view, but basically the problem is the same. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/566896