Comment 14 for bug 527458

Mark, making things worse as a result of making changes for the sake of changing is also a well established consequence of the "less is more" principle ;o)

The whole system tray was a mess for many years and I raise my hat to the Ubuntu team for making drastic changes to try and bring order to chaos.

That being said, I find it hard to see any negative impact with leaving the tooltips available on application indicators as it is not taking any visual space by default nor is it displayed unless you trigger it by hovering over icon. It might prevent some developers from finding other avenues to display information (such as the disabled menu items to display song info in the Rhythmbox indicator) but my guess is that leaving tooltips on until devs (both within and outside of the Ubuntu world) transition to other methods is better for the end-user ATM.

Also, I think the poorly phrased tooltips & translation requirement argument is bogus. Only very few symbols are universally understood. While removing few extra strings from translation workload, your also removing critical context the interface which helps users identifying the understanding of an icon that might not be meaningful in his/her society.