System Tray Icon Update

I’ve posted a new version of my system tray icon implementation to bug 325353. For those who haven’t been paying attention, this patch implements an XBL binding called “trayicon” that adds an icon to the system tray. It currently works on Windows only.

Key features of the trayicon are support for minimizing and closing windows to the system tray, choosing the icon/tooltip to use and displaying a context menu when the icon is right-clicked.

For this patch I tried to integrate all the feedback that I’ve received in comments to the bug. My goal is to get it reviewed and checked in as soon as possible. I also ported to the latest trunk sources, but I’ve posted a version for the 1.8 branch (Firefox 2.0) as well. I don’t expect the latter to make its way into Firefox, but I figured it might be useful to people creating their own Mozilla builds (including us). Finally, I separated out all the Windows-specific code to make it as straightforward as possible to create implementations for other platforms. I’m hoping that someone will step up and create versions for MacOS and Linux. There’s a sample extension attached to the bug if you want to give it a spin.

Long-term users of AllPeers will remember that we used to use this system tray icon, but we discontinued this because of various problems. In a nutshell, it felt too much like we were hijacking the browser by adding something as fundamental as a system tray icon with close to tray functionality. (This is a diplomatic way of saying that I nearly got lynched by a radical group of Firefox fanatics.) We have a strategy for resolving this, however, and I’ll be talking about this more in the (hopefully near) future.

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4 Comments »

1. There is no such thing like the system tray as Raymond Chen explains here.

   Comment by Don Quixote — 2/23/2007 @ 8:45 pm

2. And to echo what many of the comments said: *no one* in the real world calls it the “taskbar notification area”. They call it the “system tray”. So System Tray it is.

   Comment by Ron — 2/23/2007 @ 9:03 pm

3. Ya, this is just fighting windmills (and if I were dead serious about this, I would have commented on the bug, not here) - I still wonder (and this is a more general wondering, not addressed to you :)) how someone can read “Sends a message to the taskbar’s status [hm, is this a doc bug?] area” in the documentation for Shell_NotifyIcon and still name the thing wrong. The reason because They call it the “system tray” is not a good one, though, otherwise Firefox would be FireFox or even Iceweasle

   As for the functionallity to minimize windows to the “area next to the clock”: I begin to presume that power users want to have an “icon only” mode for the taskbar, otherwise these massive request to flood this mis-named and abused area does not make much sense.

   Anyway, I am looking forward to hear about the strategy to implement this binding on the other platforms.

   P.S.: Is it just me or is the comment textarea a tad small?

   Comment by Don Quixote — 2/24/2007 @ 4:34 am

4. For Linux, http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkStatusIcon.html http://live.gnome.org/GtkStatusIconTutorial

   Comment by James — 2/24/2007 @ 6:59 am

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