what is the "Workspace Switcher" and why has it deposited a brown smudge over half my

[cov]

Frankly I find the "Workspace Switcher" to be less than entirely useless.

But it has apparently decided that I need a brown smudge over half my screen for some unfathomable reason.

How do switch this off?

And how do I remove the icon from the side panel where it is possible to invoke it by accident?

Who on earth thought that this was a good idea anyway?

Are there seriously people for whom this feature is even slightly useful?

[hodad]

I'm having the same "brown smudge" problem with my screen, which is why I came looking here today. Once I invoke the WS switcher, the right half of my screen stays translucent brown until I reboot. Any ideas what we can do about this?

I have to disagree about the usefulness of the WS switcher, however. Now that I've been using it for a year, I find in totally indispensable! In Unity, it has some bugs. For ex, used to be able to bring up separate instances of Firefox in each WS, but now same instance comes up on all WS screens. Same for all other apps I have tried to open in multiple instances.

Any help with these bugs would be appreciated!