As of 4.10, I noticed that the taskbar buttons for minimized windows become gray and faded out. While I can understand it might be useful to distinguish between maximized and minimized windows (under the assumption that one uses minimized windows less often, which is true for some user workflows and false for others which minimize windows often), this particular implementation makes the user experience worse than having no distinction between minimized/maximized windows at all.

The whole point of icons, is that humans are much better at recognizing them and using them as quick visual cues over text labels. Especially for small icons such as the ones used in the taskbar, what stands out most is the color, e.g. when I want to open Firefox I don't look for a picuture of a fox hugging a globe, but just 'the little orange one'.. With larger icons, or if there are several icons that are similar in color, then the general shape also helps (i.e. 'ktorrent is the arrow, dolphin is the box thing' even though the color is close.

However, with the new taskbar minimized window icons, they are turned to grayscale so all coloring visual cues are lost, and then they are faded resulting in much less contrast (especially if the panel is semi-transparent), so the shape and image also become much harder to notice. Even the text contrast is pretty bad. So as a result, all advantages of using icons as quick visual cues are gone, and I find myself consciously making an effort to look closer at the screen and go over the taskbar buttons one by one in search of the window I want to work with, which is something I never had to even think about in previous versions where the subconsious picks up the icon cues with no effort.

To double the anecdote, the only other KDE user I've worked with in person since the update to 4.10 a few days ago, started up a conversation by pointing out this exact same issue.

I'm not sure what the previous behavior was (which is proof that it did the job well without getting in the way), but I highly recommend either reverting to whatever that was, or finding some other way of distinguishing maximized/minimized windows on the taskbar if it's that important. Perhaps just a partial desaturation of color, or just a very slight fade, or adding a gentle highlight or spotlight to maximized window icons... it doesn't have to be eye-grabbing at all, as long as the subconcious can pick up the cue and work with it more efficiently. Even the Mac OSX tiny ball of light under active application icons is better than this, and I don't like those light balls at all ;-)


Reproducible: Always