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Why "minimize to tray" is terrible
FIRST TECH THREAD, BITCHES
Imagine, for a moment, a basic corded touch-tone telephone. You pick up the receiver, enter a sequence of 7 or 10 numbers, and it places your call.
Now imagine if that telephone works exactly as you'd expect, but with one exception: if the phone number you're dialing ends in 7, it won't place the call unless you hold down the 7 key until you hear it start to ring. That's what "minimize to tray" is.
For a user interface to be effective, it has to follow a consistent set of rules. The user needs to be able to expect that taking the same action will always produce the same result. For Microsoft Windows, one of those rules is that clicking the minimize button reduces your window to a taskbar button...not a tray icon.
It's even worse in Windows 7 and 8, because if you have any sense you're going to hide all the tray icons except the two or three you actually pay attention to. I can't tell you how many time this has happened to me: I minimize something, not paying attention (after all, why would I? I expect minimize to work) and quickly switch to something else without realizing my app takes "minimize" to mean "become a tray icon". Then when I want to switch back I can't find my window, I assume I mistakenly closed it, and I start the app again. Only later, when I click the "show all icons" button, do I realize there are multiple instances of the app still open.
Developers have had since 1995 to get this right, so I don't understand why they're still doing this. I can only assume it's a misguided belief that people don't want apps that you mainly leave running in the background to stay on their taskbar.
Comments
I don't want apps that I mainly leave running in the background to stay on my taskbar.
So nuh-uh.
Yes, well, we established long ago that you have terrible taste in user interfaces, so you don't count. :P
Seriously though, I can understand why you'd want something to "live" in the tray--there's no need to have my antivirus program in the taskbar all the time--but if I explicitly open a window from that app, I expect its window to behave the same as any other window.
What DYRE said.
Minimize to tray only makes sense for things that can reasonably be thought of as "background processes" though.
^^ Understandably. If it doesn't behave the way you'd expect, it might be tray you.
Well, okay, let's say I have something we can all agree is a "background process". It lives in the tray, so to speak, because it needs to be running at all times, but only needs to show a window 10% of the time.
When it does eventually show a window, I still expect that window to minimize to the taskbar. Otherwise, what's the point of having a minimize button? If the app already had a tray icon and it minimizes to tray, it's exactly the same as if I'd clicked the close button!
the hell is the tray
That little row of icons on the taskbar, next to the clock.
The place next to the clock with all little icons of stuff you have running in the background.
The technical term is the "notification area", but the apps that have this setting all seem to call it "minimize to tray" so I went with "tray" for consistency's sake.
ten-second ninja
Oh. I don't even know what's down there except for my battery, sound and internet thingies.
It was called the tray pre-Vista iirc.
I use minimize to tray to hide background-style processes, yes, as well as stuff I want to keep open but don't want to distract me at the moment.
Also: http://trayit.en.softonic.com/
Now you can minimize anything you want to the tray.
For those things that do that by default, you should be able to tweak their settings so that they don't minimize to tray.
This just leaves those programs that minimize to tray by default whose settings you can't change. Those programs are douchebags.
It was useful for things like music players where you want it to run in the background but you still wanted some control over it without bringing up the full window. If the app can spawn multiple versions of itself and is using the minimize to tray feature then the app is violating the guidelines set out by Microsoft for the feature in all version of windows.
Funny, music players are exactly the things I hate this behavior with.
I want to keep the window at hand so I can pick the next song easily. Playlists are for suckers. :P
Alright, one of you will have to explain this to me, because I'm not sure I understand why minimizing to the tray would ever be a desirable behavior.
Let's say BackgroundApp32 mostly stays in the background but occasionally needs to show a window.
It seems like the ideal solution would be to have the minimize button minimize to the taskbar (standard behavior) and have the close button close the window but keep BackgroundApp32 running with a tray icon. That way if someone wants to dismiss the window and go on their way, they can just close it, but if someone wants to just get it out of the way for a moment to attend to something else, they can minimize it like any other window.
(To clarify, BackgroundApp32's tray icon would be shown at all times, not just when the window is closed.)
What am I missing here?
Minimizing to tray preserves a visual reminder of the presence of that window, without making its presence too noticeable.
For example, I would want to minimize to tray...
* a running process that doesn't natively go to tray, but that I just want running in the background and I want to mostly ignore
* a process that's less important but is taking up space on my taskbar
* a process that I can't let people know (from looking at the taskbar) I'm actively doing
^^That is exactly what steam does, but it goes against the guidelines Microsoft has set out for the Tray[1].
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa511448.aspx#minimizingprograms
The easiest example of a program I definitely want to minimize to tray is a torrent client. There are reasons why you'd want to keep up a torrent client for long amounts of time but almost no reason why you'd want the window to stay open for long amounts of time. It's more useful for the minimize button be to tray and the close button be actual close then the minimize button be to the taskbar and the close button be to tray, because you're more likely to want to close a torrent client entirely then minimize it to the taskbar.
Though, I agree that multiple instances of a minimize to tray app opening if you open the app while it's still in the tray is silly behavior. Opening the app while it's still in the tray should open up the old instance.
I'd actually agree with CA that having specific windows minimze to tray is probably wrong. The problem is that Windows doesn't really have a separate idea of "an application being open" as a separate concept from "an application having a window open".
It's not really significantly easier to restore a minimized window than to restore an application from the tray, other than that a tray icon is smaller so it's slightly harder to click.
I'm not seeing how that contradicts what I said, unless you're referring to the bit that says don't use the close button to minimize to tray.
But in my example I wasn't using the close button to minimize to the tray. The tray icon is always present with BackgroundApp32 is running; the window is not. So using the close button to hide the window isn't "minimizing it to the tray", it's just, y'know, closing the window.
Taskbar button: one click
Tray icon: three clicks (click on the arrow to show hidden tray icons, then double-click on the icon itself)
μTorrent actually provides a perfect example of the behavior that seems most intuitive to me.
If you have it start when your computer starts, the tray icon is there all along. The window is not. If I open the window, I can close it with the close button and the tray icon remains. In that case, the close button isn't being used to "minimize it to the tray"--the tray icon is there whether the window is visible or minimized or closed. It's merely closing the window that I previously opened.
It generally only takes one click on a tray icon to make a window show up.
In fact, that seems to always be the behavior.
And I don't see any reason not to have all of your tray icons visible at all times.
Some of us have shitty low-res monitors.Also, counting, I have eighteen tray icons. That seems like a lot to have showing even on a decent monitor.
I also have a shitty low-res monitor.
Plus I have a low tolerance for visual clutter. I don't even keep icons on my desktop; why would I keep any tray icons visible except the ones I actually need to see (like Wi-Fi strength and battery meter)?
This is the sole thing that MacOS does better than Windows -- it doesn't tie an application being open to a window being open.
Actually it is. If it's in the taskbar, you can Alt-Tab to it; Alt-Tabbing is much faster than moving your pointer to the tray icon or taskbar tab.
This is not intuitive to me. When I click the close button, I expect the program to close, not the window to simply be hidden. In other words, I see "minimize to tray" as an offshoot of "minimize", which shouldn't be confused with "close".
That said, some programs do what you say, such as Skype, and I've decided that I'll just get used to them on a case-by-case basis. I do find it slightly more annoying that I have to go to the tray to close them, though.
Because there's like...seventeen of them, and even a two-unit-high taskbar can be cluttered. Plus, many of them are kinda useless to me. But I tell the useful ones to show icon and notifications.
Would be nice if "show icon and notifications" was the default, rather than "show only notifications".
I object to 768-pixel-high monitors being called shitty.
Also some of us like portability along with full computer functionality.
But they are. They're pretty small and because most content (other than games and movies) is oriented vertically rather than horizontally, you only get to use like half of the monitor anyway (well, that's an issue with widescreen monitors in general, but of course it's less of a problem for bigger ones just because... they're bigger). And I say this as someone who primarily uses a 1366x768 laptop display.
On the topic of widescreens, yeah, 1366x768 is wide enough for the width to be too big a single application, but not wide enough to fit two applications side by side.
I'd personally love to have a longscreen. Would make reading stuff on computer far, far easier. In fact, the prevalence of widescreens bugs me.
I have a monitor that can swivel, so it can be 1080x1920 if I want. It's sort of a nice feature but actually I find that it's too tall, so I end up not wanting to look at the entire screen... It ends up being easier just having it oriented normally. Also I'm worried that it'll fall off its stand or something, but as long as you have a monitor that has a non-terrible stand that shouldn't be an issue.
If you have something that's 1920 pixels wide, you effectively CAN use it as two things side by side anyway, so you don't have the need for a longscreen.
Not entirely true.
If I'm reading comics on a website (and therefore don't have the option to view two pages side-by-side) it's somewhat better to have the screen oriented vertically rather than horizontally, to maximize the resolution I can view pages at without having to scroll because having to scroll to read manga is unbearable (probably less of an issue with webcomics and possibly English-language print comics, though).
Of course that still screws things up if there's a two-page spread and it relies on a fault in an interface anyway (that is, that I don't have the option to view two pages at once so I have to settle with the next best thing), so... yeah.
Also theoretically I could use it to play vertical shmups at a reasonable resolution (i.e. using more than half of my screen) but I have not actually done that yet.