One of the most interesting changelog that I have read in a While. Well written, thoughtful and gave me good insight into the project.
> Talking about the notification tray, due to Ged’s work, icons of killed and finished process are now automatically removed, even when apps crash. This is something that Windows doesn't even provide with Win10, and many Windows users may have noticed.
Made me chuckle. This has bothered me since forever. It seemed like such a low hanging fruit to fix, I wonder why Microsoft never did.
I'm assuming it's because of the size of the codebase, available engineering resources, return-on-investment calculation, and a business prioritization of new features over refinement.
Most engineers can look at their own work or codebase and think, "well, that's a bit shit but it works well enough." I can't imagine their backlog. I'm sure it's lurking in an issue queue somewhere.
ReactOS, another guess here, does either a polling check if all taskbar icons have valid process handles or a check whenever a process exits.
Having worked at large corporations (not Microsoft) before, I can definitely see how things like this happen --- and the reason why "enterprise" software tends to have a lot of these superficially simple and annoying defects. To add insult to injury, the codebase is often offensively overengineered and in precisely the wrong direction to facilitate the change required to fix such bugs, and even the tiniest of changes requires a ton of extra paperwork, approvals, and reviews.
Explorer can’t tell if the app connected to an icon crashed without polling or other tricks which Microsoft probably wants to avoid. But it can tell if you move the mouse over them and it can’t send the messages to the application.
Also the notification area with a million icons is bad UI that I can imagine Microsoft not wanting to invest in. They tried to discourage its use by hiding most of the icons all the time.