Is there a way to prevent windows from being “always on top”? If not, can we make this possible? Where in the code should I look to implement this?
I was disturbed to discover that gnome allows applications to force their window to overlap all other windows. It should be up to the user to decide which window they want to look at.
I understand some users may want a window to remain pinned above all other windows, but this is a user’s decision, not an application developer’s decision. There are some applications with egregious practices here, such as zoom. Allowing applications to make this decision unilaterally is a UX failure.
When an application makes its window “always on top”, it’s asserting that its window is more important than any other windows that are currently open. This is simply out of scope for that application to decide. The application may decide about the content within its own scope, not about other the importance of the content of other applications running on the system. This decision is only in scope for the person managing the system (which is the user), not the person developing the application.
My personal preference would be to simply strip out this feature. I can’t imagine any situation when I would want a window pinned above all others. But I get that other people want this. The ideal solution would be to allow users to explicitly pin any windows that they want always-on-top. Then every user can have exactly what they want in every situation. I understand this would be a paradigm shift for gnome though. So I think a fair compromise would be to provide a toggle for users to completely disable support for always-on-top.
If anyone can direct me to the relevant areas of code, I’m happy to make the change myself. If the project is not open to the change, I would be interested in maintaining my own fork.