should not do the expose effect if there is one instance only on this workspace

 status new

I'm not sure I agree. We generally want a consistent result for each
action. There are exceptions, but they need to be thought through
carefully. John Lea, cc'd, has coordinated the spread/switch discussions
on desktop unity, let's ask his comment before confirming this report.

Mark

We have gone through a lot of iterations with this behavior, there is quite a complex set of trade-offs in the launcher/workspace interactions.

We have a prototype that covers *some* of these interactions, see https://chinstrap.canonical.com/~johnlea/1104spread/unity_workspaces.air

With regards to the question of what happens when a user clicks on a app icon in the launcher when there is one instance of the app open in each of the two workspaces the answer is that yes, nothing should happen if firefox is already focused in the current workspace

We had to go through a lot of iterations to reach this conclusion ;-)

I think this was actually already done in 3.6.
Please double check and reopen in case I'm wrong.

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/689733 and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/683170 where the behaviour of launchers should generally be limited on the active workspace.

I'm using 14.04 right now and the bug has been already fixed.