Comment 23 for bug 292098

It is necessary because of the text-next-to-icons setting we applied in 8.10, back then not all default window sizes were looking good using this setting so Riddell and seele tweaked them a bit.
AFAIK these changes were pushed upstream and thus can be dropped from 9.04 completely.

That said... I think Riddell mentioned that he would prepare an SRU and IIRC he also was in favor of dropping the okular rule completely.