Re: [Usability] Gnome taskbar grouping annoyance

[Jacob Beauregard <jake13jake comcast net>]

From observation, it seems as though newly grouped entries enter at the 
beginning of the taskbar, not randomly. However, it seems like it would make 
more sense to group entries at the first position used, right? I mean, this 
is especially true when using the automatic grouping feature.

Other than this, there are a few other things I might mention about the GNOME 
taskbar. There are a number of things you might want to do with a window. 
Switching focus is the main one. Minimize/Restore is included to help manage 
things. However, if you have a ton of things open and killing them would help 
make things more manageable, it's going to take a lot more time, and the task 
bar becomes extremely unhelpful.

Being able to close stuff via middle click, or being able to have a close 
button. This is how many tabbed interfaces are beginning to behave, and they 
are used for similar reasons that the task bar is used. They also complement 
the task bar as a means of hierarchical organization, such that window 
grouping would rarely need to be used. The biggest difference is that the 
task bar controls things that can be moved around the screen and resized 
independently and tabs control things that share the same space and 
dimensions. 

To expand further, tab bars in applications have certainly changed a lot more 
in the past decade than task bars have. Why is that, and why do task bars 
offer more limited functionality when compared to tab bars? I can only see 
grouping as the only thing that the task bar can do that tab bars don't (and 
I bet someone will eventually add that to firefox in some form or another).


On Sunday 10 June 2007 06:44:08 Wilson Wang wrote:
> I have an old LCD screen which can only display 1024x768 pixel size.
> So I set the option "always grouping" for the taskbar, as Windows does by
> default.
> After using this feature, I found that I had difficulties of finding
> programs on the
> taskbar. I realized that this problem was caused by the random postioning
> of the
> programs on the taskbar. I hope that developers here can tackle this issue.
>
>
>
> -Wilson