“Applications” settings: Not obvious what “Search” means
gnome-control-center master, Ubuntu 19.04 beta
- Navigate to “Applications”.
- Select any app that has a “Search” item.
What you see: A switch labelled “Search”, with no explanation of what is being searched, when, or what the point is of it being an option.
This is particularly confusing when the app has its own prominent search function, such as a Web browser or e-mail client. It could easily be misinterpreted as controlling whether that app’s search function works, when really it has no effect.
I had to ask a g-c-c developer what the switch does. Apparently, when it is turned on, the app will return any relevant results for searches you enter in the shell. (So it’s not at all a “system feature used by this application”; it’s the app making a system feature more useful.) The point of it being an option is that it’s a privacy issue whether you trust the app to receive a copy of every search string you enter, when for any given app, many/most search strings will be entered with a different app in mind.
What you should see: Text that makes it obvious what’s being searched and what the tradeoff is. I doubt there’s a brief way to do this with a label alone, so probably it would need a caption as well. Something like:
Each search you enter will be sent to {App Name}.