+timbrown.  As a bonus, we won't have to worry about the 32-bit issue Ubuntu is having with libappindicator.  And we can apply our own patches if we want.  I can help out with adding the code to third_party, it should be relatively straightforward.

That's a pity. I was hoping we would get away with not statically linking an icon library before we remove status icons from Chrome altogether (assuming we do).

There's an alternative library, statusnotifier, which is a little more powerful, e.g. it allows us to set a non-menu left click action (which would tie in better with KDE). But since libayatana-appindicator is basically a drop-in replacement, it would probably be easier to just use it.

If you want to use statusnotifier, that's OK with me, so long as you're OK with updating the API calls.

I don't see a problem with statically linking since the library on disk is tiny at only 52K.  (and it would probably be even smaller with LTO which prunes unused functions, etc).  But you're right in that it would require nontrivial effort to add it to third_party.