feature suggestion: adjustable show-up sensitivity

[Shannon]

While using Firefox, the “back" button is frequently used. Lots of times when I move my mouse toward the "back" button, it will inadvertently trigger the unity launcher, which is quite annoying. I also notice similar problem with Mac OSX's bottom launcher, especially while using vmware view client with a remote windows running inside.

This behavior in unity is sometime very annoying and may easily put off first time users, give them something to badmouth unity.

I also tried to use ccsm to adjust "hot spot" of the unity launcher, but can't get better user experience than the default setting. i.e. if I let it to popup only when the mouse hovers over the top-left corner but not the left border of screen, the launcher appears very sluggishly.

My suggestion is to add an extra api so that individual application can specify it's own "sensitive areas". For example, the attached image shows firefox's "sensitive area", while this area is "registered" with unity, the unity launcher shall NOT appear so fast while mouse is hovered in that area (while firefox is the active full screen application.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

thanks for the bug report. You can already adjust the sensitivity in compizconfig-settings-manager under unity plugin, there is also a bug report to make the autohide less prone to false positive. see bug 765819

[Marco Trevisan (Treviño) (3v1n0)]

This is a nice idea by the way. However it would need to add lots of libunity dependency and patches to external programs such as firefox, and I don't know if this is something wanted.

[Shannon (xrfang-gmail)]

I am not clear about libunity dependency, but, would that be normal that unity panel depends on libunity? :-)

Also, I don't think patches are needed for external programs... this should be handled by the panel, just like the window manager. compiz can handle this by matching program title and predefined rules about (in)sensitive areas of a specific program.

[Mike Coleman (tutufan)]

It's an interesting idea, but I think that fundamentally this is still a bug in Unity, and that this behavior of Unity ("I own the screen edges, not the user") needs to be fixed.