Strange system tray behavior

Desktop Environments XFCE
#1

I’m struggling for some time with this thing, and have no idea where to start looking for issues. For starters I’m still on XFCE 4.14 on this machine.

The problem is shown in this short movie clip (in the video i have used only left clicks):
Peek 2021-01-16 16-17

Some of the tray icons react to left click as if it was a right click. And right click still acts like a right click. Other icons work as expected.

What they all have in common is the libappindicator-gtk3 dependency. I know I tried some stuff at some point to make thunderbird work as tray icon, as it doesn’t have a built in systray icon (funny enough, as can be seen in the scren capture above, the thunderbird icon works as expected, bringing the window to the foreground). I don’t remember exactly what I changed, I was trying out various scripts, and also might have installed an AUR package or two.
tl;dr: left click acts like right click on some systray icons.

Do any of you know where I could start investigating?

#2

There are reports from people in Arch and slackware experiencing the same issue. It seems to be an issue with libappindicator. Nobody has reported a fix that I could find other than removing libappindicator-gtk3.

#3

In the end I’ve opted for this route. Simply removing libappindicator removes half of XFCE.
So what I did was force remove libappindicator without affecting apps depeding on it:

sudo pacman -Rdd libappindicator-gtk3

This broke a few apps but I’ve managed to find replacements for them (like using transmission-qt instead of transmission-gtk and whatsapp-nativefier instead of whatsapp-for-linux).

But most important of all, the tray icons finally work as expected. Single left click brings up the application’s window.