Comment 144 for bug 332945

"Using a notification icon to advertise updates is a bad idea first because it's not obvious, and second because it makes installing the updates gratuitously difficult."

This drives me nuts. As soon as the icon comes into play you get a notification telling you what happened (Hello User, updates availiable! Ding dong!), either through the bubbles in the old system or the stylish black boxes in Jaunty now. After that there sits the lovely icon and if you wonder what it means, move your mouse there and get a helpful tooltip.

"The update-notifier icon only means something once someone tells you what it is."

Yes, I told my father and from that day on he was able to update his machine after finishing his work, others will learn from the tooltip. Don't degrade what you call average users to complete idiots and it needs no academic degree to handle some icons. On the other hand, now it will be hard to explain my father why the icons are gone and that he has to close those pop-unders if he feels disturbed, then manually re-open the update-manager after he finished his work with no icon reminding him of that and why this is meant to be a superior solution.

Okay, for now I can use gconf-editor to get the old behavior back, please don't break this backwards compatibility. I hope Gnome 3.0 and the new notification center there wil drive your ivory tower theory to an end. For me you definitely made things worse, consider incorporationg upstream developers next time and don't rely on any usability study before discussing it with your community.