Comment 7 for bug 773979

"Those icons don't behave in a consistant way and are an issue for the user experience."

Sebastian,

This is exactly the reason Indicators are a solution looking for a problem. Most operating systems have had system trays for years. These system trays all work pretty much like the one in GNOME 2 (which Unity is still using, only with this insane "whitelisting" approach".

The removal of this system tray functionality actually ruins the user experience. When you close Xchat, it disappears because it has nowhere to go to. It thinks it is running in the system tray but Ubuntu has hidden it, it it is still open and the user can't shut it down without kill -9. The "indicator" applet for XChat is broken and fails to behave as a replacement for the system tray icon. The user will just click it presuming the first instance is still running and it will open a second Xchat.

The problem is there with Banshee too. Once you open it there seems to be no way to close it. It refuses to close, it stays running in the "sound menu" until you log out or, again, bust out kill -9.

This combined with the hourly random freezes (which is a whole different issue entirely) are why I used Unity for less than a day before I snapped and went back to KDE. Unity is unusable and replacing worthwhile things like the system tray with proprietary Ubuntu replacements that do exactly the same thing, only broken, doesn't help your user experience, at all.