Comment by modeless
21 hours ago
They ought to put the status bar at the bottom. All the designers using Macs probably forgot, but Chrome's tab interface was designed for Windows where it could be all the way at the top of the screen. And in general it's more common for desktop apps designed for mouse and keyboard to have frequently accessed UI elements at the top of the window than the bottom. So desktop apps would benefit from being able to use that real estate at the very top of the screen.
This is what you lose when you take a team developing a desktop OS and move it under a team doing a mobile OS.
Elements on the top of the screen have virtually infinite height, and elements in the corners have infinite height and width. You can't aim "too high" for something at the top of the screen.
Status bars on top don't make sense if you have tabs on top. Now your tabs are infinitely smaller, and aiming at them requires a lot more effort.
Mac's original design had the menubar on top, and its windows didn't have tabs, so it all worked fine together. That's not the case for browsers with tabs on top.
Along the way, it seems most designers have forgotten about Fitt's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law#Implications_for_U...
The linked article seems to imply that this remains a good design choice even today:
> The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which always places the menu bar on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current program's windowframe.
I guess now that the browser is the one app you probably spend the most amount of time in, it might make a little less sense? Android's lack of a menu bar system makes it make very little sense there.
Apple's design never made sense. It's fine when apps are maximised but it gets very confusing when apps are not maximised and the menu is very far from the app that it belongs to.
Since it only works well for maximised apps, the UX is much better if you just merge the menu into the title bar of apps.
1 reply →
I wonder how relevant Fitt's law is with bigger screens and the drastically changed ratio between mouse hand movement and cursor movement on screen. It used to be that you could reach a screen corner with a very simple flick of the mouse hand wrist. But that doesn't feel the same way anymore on modern hardware.
FWIW, Apple's known to have a slightly more aggressive mouse/trackpoint acceleration curve to account for this. (In retrospect it's probably why Apple went all out on luxuriously large trackpads.)
Depends on your configuration, I guess. I just tried this with my mx master with its standard resolution (so no ridiculous 800000 dpi gaming mouse) on a 4k 32" at 100% under windows. I can easily reach a corner with a quick flick of the wrist.
On my laptop's FHD screen it's even better.
Auto-hide the task bar at the bottom, and you've basically got the Gnome UI. Works just fine. It's the permanent screen reservation of the double task bar that really eats up the usable desk space.
Samsung's task bar (when you enable the DeX integration on a tablet) also supports this and it makes for a fine user experience.
Edit: I've enabled "force desktop mode" on my Pixel 9 Pro and hooked it up to my laptop dock. The UI looks almost exactly the same already. Taskbar at the bottom, notification bar at the top.
It's clearly experimental; my ultrawide screen scales horribly, my keyboard app gets horribly confused, and interacting with the top bar triggers a full-screen tablet overlay that looks a bit weird.
However, Chrome opens multiple windows and browses just fine. There are right-click menus, mouse hover interactions, window resizing features (though some apps require the "force resizable activities" flag). Ethernet Just Works, audio/video just works, and I can operate my phone screen while working in dock mode (so apps that absolutely refuse to work can still be operated through the touch screen).
Hiding the bottom bar doesn't solve the problem because it still takes the corners away. You can't put UI there because the bottom bar will come up and cover it when you mouse into the corner. The OS is taking all four corners for itself. Greedy! Apps should have that space. Apps are what we are here to use and the OS is getting in the way.
macOS doesn't seem to care and that's what all the designers use. I'm guessing people think it's pretty?
The dock would also better if it weren't stretched to the entire screen width by default but perhaps Google is planning to use that space for something. It's also possible they're going to remove the top bar at some point, that'd make the UI standard Windows-shaped.
The Gnome trick for the dock is to only show the dock when hitting the Super button which also brings up the virtual desktops and what macOS might call Launchpad (except not full screen by default). Ubuntu likes to force the dock on you the way macOS does, but you can disable that.
2 replies →
My previous Pixel (a 4a) had problems with getting unduly warm. I've heard it's better on later models but still not solved. How has your 9 Pro done with heat?
I haven't noticed much. It can get hot when I'm taxing it (i.e. running large LLMs), but it takes a lot for the rather underpowered Tensor SoC to get warm.
Inexplicably, Samsung removed the ability to hide the taskbar with One UI 8 last year.
They rebuilt DeX on Google's desktop codebase. So obviously a lot of features were lost. Hopefully what we'll gain is wider app support.
[dead]
What I don't get is why they don't design UIs with a status bar on the side - you have so much waster horizontal real estate both in landscape monitors, with every website, code editor having huge bars on the either side of the text.
Smartphones are portrait screens and its clear that having only that much horizontal real estate is enough.
I always put my taskbar on the side, both on MacOS and Windows. Well, I used to on Windows but apparently that’s too much to ask from Windows 11.
I would put all bars at the top. On a touch-enabled screen it's much easier to touch something at the top than something next to the keyboard, so I move the taskbar to the top on all my Windows two-in-ones.
Shout out to https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher for forcing this behavior even on Windows 11.
Why not at the side, though? Better use of the vertical space and no issues with touchscreens (interactable items on top, hand reaching from the side). That's how I do it on every desktop/laptop machine I own.
I don't remember why I did that, tbh. Having it at the side works as well, I agree.
And ChromeOS is designed for Chrome's tab bar, so that it is at the top edge of the screen, essentially making it infinitely tall. This is one of the things that makes surfing the web more pleasant and ChromeOS then on Windows and Mac.
With many linux window managers you can move the statusbar to the bottom, hide the titlebar and configure chrome to use the (now hidden) system titlebar for the same effect.
Agreed. Those few little icons at the top are wasting an entire row on the screen. That junk can go in the corner of the taskbar like Windows.
I think that the first smartphones were way smaller than today’s ones played a role. They were not that elongated either, the aspect ratio was way closer to a square. I could easily reach the top bar back then. It was definitely not a hurdle. But of course that’s not true for a long time now.
Agree. They should make the desktop UI similar to what is there on ChromeOS or Samsung Dex. The top bar doesn't make sense at all.
For me the only feature I want from a taskbar/status bar is ability to hide it permanently so it never comes out until I press a key on a keyboard (like meta/Windows key or even a key combination if needed). Task bar auto popping just because you weren't precise with your mouse and moved it too far down or to the corner is very annoying to me. I treat it as a test if desktop environment have "we will force our way down your throat" or "we try to make it great for everyone" attitude. Windows and Apple are choosing the former. KDE is choosing the latter.
I am surprised because somehow they get it on phones (hidden by default, needs a gesture to bring down). Real estate on a laptop is a just as precious, especially vertical real estate.
iOS did exactly this and it’s so much better for usage