Comment 22 for bug 130235

If the User doesn't know the width of the dock but has to mouse over the part of the dock that actually is present, and the dock is of variable width, one of the following must be true:
1. The user has to guess at or keep track of where the dock is
2. The user has to throw the mouse towards the center of the screen /every time/ he wants the dock
3. The user has to wave the mouse around (in hopes of finding where the dock is) some/most of the time to get the dock up.

This is not exactly a terrible idea, now that i think of it. It would be better if the dock could be pinned to a corner pixel, preferably the left one because firefox etc. often puts a lot of interactive stuff in the lower right corner (ABP, Noscript, Greasemonkey, ... list goes on). Since corner pixels have (effectively) infinite area, this means less guesswork for the user and better conformance to Fitts' law. A gesture should be optional and configurable, since, for some users, the bar is used every ten seconds and when it's not in use it's hidden, while at the other end of the spectrum, some users rarely/never use it except to launch applications (you have <Alt>+<Tab> for everything else) and rarely run more than one app (so they primarily use awn from the Desktop, when it's /never hidden/ and therefore have no need to see awn intruding on their apps, but still want to be able to access it, just in case. The former obviously would not want any gesture (slows down access) whilst the latter would desire a complex gesture to reduce false positives. Give both what they want.