Comment 39 for bug 331054

May I add the following anecdote as a reason to revert to the old behaviour: My mother, by any standard a computer illiterate person, discovered the notification icon on her own and regularly updates her 8.04 machine. The behaviour was clearly good enough to illicit her attention. I had never told her what the notification icons were for or introduced her to the concept of updates, I was planning to log in remotely and carry them out for her regularly.

Recently, for some obscure reason her firefox window launched as a 3x4 pixel window. She kept clicking the firefox icon, opening 12 windows until I told her what was going on. I explained the concept of the task bar many times before and still she never looks at it, which is why she didn't notice that there were already 12 instances open.

My hypothesis is that most users regard the panels as frames which are filled with unimportant information such as launchers, the clock and so on, useful in specific situations but generally ignored. The screen space which grabs their attention is the one between the panels. Therefore, a notification invading into their workspace is more likely to entice them to update, as happened in the case of my mother.

Having said that, these decisions should be made through an evidence based approach with actual user testing, not by guessing how "Joe User" thinks. If this is how the DX team arrived at their conclusion, fair enough, but if it isn't, at least survey the user base and consider reverting back to the old notifications based on the results.

If you decide to keep current behaviour, please do keep the gconf property around because I find the window getting minimized in the background horribly annoying. I have several updates which cannot currently be installed as they haven't propagated to my mirror yet and the damn thing drives me nuts.

-Bartek