Submission details
Taskbar clutter
All programs minimize to the taskbar. Having a lot of programs leads to inefficiency when many buttons need to be scanned.
Offer a minimze to system tray option. Perhaps a left click on the minimize button minimizes to taskbar, while a right click on the minimize button minimzes to the system tray.
This would be very useful for programs you want to leave open, but don't necessarily need to access them as often, or you just want to move them out of the way for some time.
Medium
Low
Not fixed
Turbo wrote on June 12, 2008, 5:20pm
The Notification Area (aka: System Tray, but it's not the correct name) is abused already. I don't think it was ever intended to be a place where "background" applications can rest, but a place where applications can inform the user of pertinent and/or useful things, like the network connectivity, the battery level, a pending update, a finished download, a background activity happening (malware scan, syncronization, backup, etc), a security alert (AV disabled, out-dated), that sort of thing. Very few such icons merit to be permanent.
It's definitely NOT a place to put shortcuts to your program (I'm looking at you, antivirus, messengers, outlook).
A better solution, I feel, would be to allow the user to group together "background" applications, pretty much like multiple instances of the same app are grouped today. Perhaps a spot in the taskbar where you can manually drag a button or app.