Comment 6 for bug 821944

On the one hand, it might be considered undesirable to introduce inconsistency by making clicking on a running application's icon in the launcher minimize the application, in just this one particular case. But on the other hand, this would arguably not really be inconsistency. When an application is in the foreground but has multiple windows and you click its icon in the launcher, all the windows are shrunk down and displayed so you can select between them. When there is only one window, it might make sense for it to "shrink down" to nothingness and give way to other applications' windows, as this feature request argues should happen.

It seems to me that there remains a very serious problem with this proposal, however: When a user clicks an application's icon in the launcher, it is typically with the intention of causing all the application's windows to be displayed. Often, an application might have only one window, but the user might not be sure of that. Clicking a foreground application's icon in the launcher is currently an excellent way to find out if there are other windows associated with that same application. With the change proposed here, the user would have to click it (finding out it's the only one, because it the window disappears), and then click it again to make the window reappear. Right now, when an application has a foreground window, clicking the application's icon in the launcher is the only efficient way to determine if it has other windows. With the proposed change, would there be any efficient way for a user to determine if the foreground window is the only window in its application?