Windows 7 Taskforce

Opacity controls for Icons and taskbar buttons- necessary fix for plasma monitor owners

Submitted by grasswhistle on December 10, 2009 to Aesthetics, Annoyance, Icons

Problem: As of now, there is no way to set the opacity for desktop icons or icons on the taskbar (the taskbar itself is translucent, but the windows button along with any fixed windows and text on the far right of the taskbar is opaque).

Now I use my win7 desktop as a home media center, and thus have hooked up to the living room Plasma TV. In order to avoid long-term usage burn in (the burn in that happens with having the same image up on the screen for hours a day every day for extended periods of time, like a few months) of the taskbar icons and the desktop icons, must have the taskbar permanently set on hide AND I have to periodically relocate all of my desktop icons.

It is worth noting that this problem does not exist for gadgets, as the opacity of them can be set simply by right clicking on the gadget, and gives options from 100%-20% opacity. This is exactly what should be done with icons, either individual right click, or highlighting all of them and right-clicking. Implementations should be incredibly simple for desktop icons. While the implementation to do this for buttons/icons on the taskbar may be a bit trickier, this is offset by the auto-hide feature of the taskbar as an alternative option. Desktop icons have no alternative, they must be removed from the desktop completely or periodically moved/rearranged.

Solution: Add Opacity controls for everything on the taskbar and desktop icons somewhere within the display options in the control panel.

If there were opacity controls/options then the ability to have rotating wallpapers would completely eliminate the need to take such steps and the worry of long term burn in.

For whatever reason, I have seen this brought up two times, and both times a significant amount of users here have downvoted the suggestion for seemingly no real reason. If you would like to downvote, I would appreciate if you could at least comment on why you think this should not implemented for people using plasma monitors (and saying 'don't use a plasma TV' isn't a good reason).

Severity: Medium

Impact: Medium

Status: Not fixed