Re: [Usability] Gnome taskbar grouping annoyance

["Wilson Wang" <wilsonwg gmail com>]

> 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.

Yes, that was exactly what I was expecting.


> 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.

I am not really sure about the point that you tried to get here.. However, on 
Windows you could kill multiple windows with a right click on the group and 
choose close the group. And I also think that taskbar is still very useful even with
several things opened. 

> 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. 

You can close program windows with the middle click in Gnome. 

> They also complement 
> the task bar as a means of hierarchical organization, such that window 
> grouping would rarely need to be used. 

On Firefox, I actully manually regroup tabs quite often. Both IE and Opera
also offer auto-grouping options that help users to manage tabs. However,
I always set the tabs to appear  


>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. 

I think it's also a matter of choice to the users. Tabs are useful in some
situations but sometimes not. Even though you can group browser windows with 
either tabs or the taskbar, you could not get spatial information with tabs.
For example, with tabs, you could not compare the contents of two browser windows 
at the same time. For me, the only reason that keeps me using tabs in browsers
is because tabs are located at the upper screen rather than at the lower screen
so that my eye balls don't have to constantly move up and down (and I don't like
to have the gnome menu at the button). 


> 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