Comment 174 for bug 1170647

Adam, that's because you blacklisted that device icon from staying pinned to the launcher.

But as it was an un-pinned app, once you open it it has to stay to the launcher. The same behavior would apply to an app that you open and close.
I don't think that grouping it with nautilus is the right solution in that case... It would probably easy to do it (patches with optional settings welcome, and I can help you guys to go through the codebase), but I don't see this as being coherent.

As general consideration, I think the simple association is:

The fact that nautilus can have a tabbed view makes things harder. I actually supported tabs in my initial implementation, but there was the problem where a window was matched by multiple icons, and I think this was wrong (what to do if you had multiple locations opened, from the same devices, spread around multiple windows and tabs, when activating the "app/device" window spread/scale?).
So the thing was just simplify it by considering only the main (active) view of a nautilus window.

The fact that there are multiple launcher icons for different device locations, it's just as it has to be. We didn't want to patch nautilus aggressively in order to be more "locked" in this scenario, thus there could be some odd behaviors, but I think all this allows to manage things quite well for the average user.