Comment by dwoldrich
6 hours ago
Apple famously abandoned per-window menus per Fitt's law[1]. Wiki[2] says:
> Apple experiments in GUI design for the Lisa project initially used multiple menu bars anchored to the bottom of windows, but this was quickly dropped in favor of the current arrangement, as it proved slower to use (in accordance with Fitts's law). The idea of separate menus in each window or document was later implemented in Windows and is the default approach in most Linux desktop environments.
I recall hearing a quote that said Jobs called the menu the ultimate discoverability tool in the designer's arsenal, but I couldn't find the quote.
I am thankful for the menu junk drawer in Firefox. Better to give me everything I can discover in a menu rather than make a zillion fugly buttons and cluttering up the chrome. Although, anything that isn't frequently used by users should at least go under a few submenus to echo OP's criticisms. If Copy Clean Link is the "right" thing to do for users, then make "Copy Raw Link" a sub-menu item.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menu_bar
Fitts’s law for menu bars made sense on a 12” monitor back then, but not so much on today’s large displays.
Maybe worthwhile to encourage a heavier reliance on right click menus going forward, then? Seems to make sense in a future VR world.
I have noticed that Mac Sequoia I'm running now has some memory as to which process last focused on each display and now is able to show a different menu per display, albeit grayed for displays where the user is not currently focused. It's a little janky, but kindof a graceful devolution of the original single menu vision.
Context menus are specifically for actions on the particular thing you click on (for example a file in a file listing, or an object in a layout program). It still makes sense to have a separate application menu bar. But personally I think menu bars are really more intuitive attached to the application window rather than at the top of the screen, potentially relatively far away from the window.
With today’s wide screens, a vertical menu bar at the side would perhaps make more sense than the usual one at the top, though, similar to vertical tabs.
I don’t see a future VR world other than for casual use, because keyboard and mouse/trackpad will remain the highest-bandwidth way to interact with a computer.
3 replies →
I'm staring at a few apps on Windows right now and none of them even have menu bars (Firefox, Outlook, Spotify, Notepad, etc).