Comment 53 for bug 407621

Christoph: As I just explained on IRC, raw customizability of the menu is not the standard we're using here -- otherwise every menu item in OpenOffice.org would need an icon merely because its menus are customizable. The Ubuntu Software Store has moved to the Applications menu (bug 431882). And I don't see any missing icons in your screenshot of the Places menu: "Connect to Server", "Search for Files", and "Recent Documents" are not objects, whereas the other items are.

antistress: Please report a bug in Firefox that the search menu should have icons, if you haven't already.

Vladimir: No, we are not doing this because Mac OS X does it. Even if we were, that Mac OS X does something does not *necessarily* make it a bad idea. The main reason it's hard to find people comparing the sexiness of interface design details is that software is a young industry (compared with music or fashion, for example), so interface design criticism is not yet an established field of literature (and the little that exists is mostly about Mac software, e.g. John Siracusa and John Gruber). You are probably correct that "Add/Remove...", with that wording, should not have had an icon, because it is an action rather than an object; but it is being replaced in the Applications menu by "Ubuntu Software Store", which is more obviously an application itself and therefore should have an icon.