This creates ambiguity for developers and makes it harder to know which APIs to use. Status icons originated prior to all of these, and overlap with three of the four. libcloudproviders for providing integrated file sync services.Search providers for integrating with system search.Notifications for informing users about events.We want to have clearly differentiated APIs, with each one having its own role. One key ingredient to achieving this is to have a straightforward set of APIs for application integration. In GNOME we have two closely related goals: to provide application developers with a clear vision of how apps should be built and to provide users with a simple, easy to understand and logical experience. It perhaps goes without saying, but status icons are something that we inherited, rather than something that was designed as part of the overall experience.īut why don’t we want them anymore? There are some specific issues with status icons, which I’ll get on to, but the main reasons relate to a) the existence of better APIs and b) how they align with GNOME’s wider design philosophy and goals. The first version of the spec is dated April 2002, which means that it predated GNOME 2.0. The why.Īs a starting point, it’s worth pointing out that status icons are pretty old. It will hopefully help those who are interested to understand the decision a little better. The rest of this post includes background information on our approach to status icons.
If you are an application developer and are uncertain about whether this change affects you, or how to adjust to it, check out the guidelines on the GNOME wiki and feel free to get in touch if you are still uncertain. This is a great opportunity to improve applications more generally!
It is also worth noting that many of the recommendations for how to provide a good experience without status icons are established guidelines anyway, and can be adopted whether an application is using a status icon or not (such as using existing APIs effectively and having a consistent behaviour when your application is launched). In many cases applications won’t have to make any changes, and if changes are required we have hopefully contacted you already. Having reviewed how applications are using status icons, we are confident that the majority of applications that use status icons will not be impacted by the decision not to display them by default.
There is also a full set of information about the change on the GNOME wiki, including an FAQ and guidelines for application developers. We will, of course, continue to monitor the situation, and will be listening to feedback. This will continue to work and the extension offers a better status icon experience than the current default anyway. If you want or need to continue using status icons, you should feel free to use the TopIcons GNOME Shell extension. That’s absolutely fine, and our decision to stop showing status icons by default is in no way a negative judgement on this. We do recognise that people are using status icons today and that some will continue to want to use them. We also feel that the consequences of the change won’t be as dramatic as they would have been in the past. We feel that, long-term, this change will enable us to provide a better experience for our users (I’ll go into some detail about this in the rest of the post). In the next release, we will be introducing a new integration API for file synchronisation apps, which will be another positive step.įrom GNOME 3.26, we are therefore planning not to show status icons in GNOME Shell by default.
This includes integrating media controls and weather information into the shell’s calendar drop down, creating the Night Light, and working with third party application developers to reduce their reliance on status icons. There’s a general consensus that we don’t want to continue with this UI for the upcoming version of GNOME 3.Īt the same time, the GNOME project has done a lot of work in recent years that reduces the importance of status icons. The tray gets in the way and it generally feels quite awkward. GNOME 3 currently shows status icons in the bottom-left corner of the screen, in a tray that slides in and out. Whatever you call it, it’s the place where a string of little icons often gets shown, typically by applications that are running in the background. A lot of people know them by the area where they appear, which gets described as the “system tray” or “notification area”. “Status icons” go by a few different names.