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Comment by greyhat | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this guy's rage against the tray. Almost every desktop system, be it OS X, KDE, Gnome, or XP has something similar. What would he prefer? A taskbar entry for wireless networks? No information at all?

He also comments that we are "finally" given options to control tray icons... he must not be too observant then, because starting in XP you could choose to always hide or always show icons, or leave them alone. (e.g. to tell your Antivirus to always hide until you expand, but make sure that your instant messaging app stays in view.)

Maybe its just me, but these new OS reviews and previews are always the most ignorant, half baked and opinionated pieces of tech journalism...

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Unlike KDE, Gnome, OS X, etc, Windows' taskbar never shuts up. It always pops up annoying bubbles, makes clicking sounds, randomly shows and hides icons, and doesn't standardize the way you can add/remove icons.

OS X fails a bit in this area, too, as it's not intuitive to remove items from the menubar.

Hmm, maybe more people agree with this guy than I thought. I have used all of the windowing systems I mentioned, and I vastly prefer being able to see open windows, with the few things that need to run in the background being tucked away in the tray. The OS X dock just seems wierd to me, in terms of being able to quickly access open windows and to get a good idea what is running on your system.

The tray is nowhere near configurable enough, and in many cases it relies on the app being polite enough to stay the hell out when you tell it to (many apps are not, in my experience). Notifications from the tray are the real bitch. When watching movies on the HTPC I built with Vista, it frequently interrupts the movie to tell me vitally important information like, "I'm going to check for new Logitech upgrades now!" "No upgrades available." Java does it, too. Infuriating.

Maybe there is a way to disable this crap, but I've been unable to figure it out. (But I can't work iTunes, either, so I could just be stupid.)

oh the tray. I hate the friggin tray on windows. All the annoying crapware is there like anti-virus and what have you. At least on os x and linux you put good programs there like dropbox, and things. I imagine that is what they are changing it to.

the system tray on windows is the annoyance that it is for one huge reason: There is no other (decent) way to have a windowless app that can be interacted with. Because, there is no application list (aside from ctrl+alt+delete). I really think that Windows needs to move beyond windows as the highest level of organisation and allow the user to work with apps directly. I cannot see myself willingly using Windows until this is the case.

OSX for example: The dock is said list, and it performs the bulk of what the system tray ends up doing. the menu bar utilities on OS X perform what the system tray was intended to do.

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