Comment by WhyNotHugo
19 hours ago
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.
I found it to not at all be confusing once I got used to it—-I find it less confusing and more reliable in practice.
Speaking from 20+ years of Windows use with a local menu bar and 7 years of Linux desktop where I switched to a global menu bar—-it was an instant improvement in quality of life.
I no longer have to hunt for a narrow menu bar strip, just throw the mouse all the way up, and hope to never hunt for it ever again.
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.