This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
Original Post: Google Stole My Menu Bar
Feed Title: Mokka mit Schlag
Feed URL: http://www.elharo.com/blog/feed/atom/?
Feed Description: Ranting and Raving
I knew there was something bugging me about Chrome, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I finally realized what it is: There’s no menu bar!
File. Edit, Help, all those useful things we’ve learned to depend on: they’re gone. Instead, there are a couple of non-standard icons hiding in the right hand corner, off to the side of the location bar. At least they had little down arrows to indicate they might be menus. Otherwise I never would have found them.
I’m not surprised to see this “innovation” coming from a company that seems to believe the only purpose of a desktop GUI is to connect you to the cloud and then get out of the way. After all this leaves an extra 15 vertical pixels or so for the web site to use for its own purposes. Nonetheless, this feels like a step backwards. Menus, and menu bars at the top of the screen, are an improvement over the old way of doing things. I do believe that web applications need better support for menu bars. Perhaps there should be a way for a web app such as Google Docs to tell the browser it wants to take control of the regular menu bar (though the security and UI implications of that would be thorny). However completely eliminating the menu bar is a step backwards. Here’s hoping Google fixes this when they release the Mac version.
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