falovendor.blogg.se

At least Microsoft itself communicated clearly, right? Well, about that….Įven worse, other groups (not the shell) picked up on this misnomer and started referring it to the tray in their own documentation and samples, some of which even erroneously claim that “system tray” is the official name of the notification area. So people thought, “Ah, systray must be the component that manages those icons, and I bet its name is ‘system tray’.” Thus began the misconception that we have been trying to eradicate for over eight years… The notification area on Windows 95. If you killed systray.exe, you lost those notification icons. I think the reason people started calling it the “system tray” is that on Win95 there was a program called “systray.exe” that displayed some icons in the notification area: volume control, PCMCIA (as it was then called) status, battery meter. So what happened? How did the word “tray” reappear? Chen offers up his best theory: Those icons were placed in the taskbar’s “notification area.” Simple. Later, Microsoft added notification icons to the taskbar. As Raymond tells it, Microsoft wiped all mentions of the “tray” everywhere from the shell documentation. Microsoft discarded this idea and replaced it with the Windows 95 taskbar. (Some might argue that this was taking the desktop metaphor a bit too far.) In early builds of Windows 95, the taskbar originally wasn’t a taskbar it was a folder window docked at the bottom of the screen that you could drag/drop things into/out of, sort of like the organizer tray in the top drawer of you desk. Telling the official history of the system tray, Chen points out that early development builds of Windows 95 had a “tray” instead of a taskbar: Amusingly enough, people still call it the “system tray” and the confusion continues 17 years later. Microsoft’s Raymond Chen wrote about this issue back in 2003.

Yes, Microsoft employees have repeatedly called it the “system tray” in various documents over the years, much to the apparent consternation of the Windows shell team, so named because they’re in charge of the Windows desktop “shell,” which includes the taskbar.