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I know a lot of people who set their taskbar to the side (specifically the left side). I like it on top myself, but I rarely use the start menu for clicking about. I just use WIN+S and start typing to search for stuff.

Ever since Windows 7, the taskbar has been on the left on every machine I use. I tried doing it on earlier Windows, but the small and long buttons made usability suffer and it looked stupid.

Start Menu engineer here. There was a bunch of precedent for having a bar at the bottom of the screen (Dos apps, Windows 1.0, Cairo etc) but mostly it was a compat issue; a bunch apps broke if the Taskbar was at the top. We thought that we could maybe move it to the top when these apps got fixed but of course by then everyone was used to it at the bottom even if the 'drop up' menu wasn't great UX.

How is “drop-down” an anti-pattern as opposed to drop-up?

I must have misspoke, 'drop up', as per Win 95 onwards is anti-pattern to me, everything menu-wise that is drop-down is good, again to me, given that is the UX I learned first with WIMP GUI's.

But why? It seems highly arbitrary to me that drop up is bad and drop down is good.

Drop downs make more sense because you always read from top down.

“drop up“ is quite natural when you trigger the menu with a key on the bottom row of the keyboard. Classic Windows UI (grumpy old me does not want to talk positively about anything since the ribbon bar) was always strongest in "combined arms" mode, mouse use on the right coordinated with the left part of the keyboard. (Whereas the Apple style seems more polarized to me between easy mouse-only and powerful keyboard-only "modes", with not much in between)

I think Theodores claims the reverse, but "drop-down" is an anti-pattern in interfaces where you use a pen or a finger because your hand will obscure the popped up menu.

Then again the Mac menu was the menu not just for the OS but also for any focused window.

With Windows mostly you used the start menu to launch stuff and that was it. for all the rest the menus were still drop down, but embedded inside the relevant window rather than nail to the top of the screen (not sure how much of that was to neuter the Apple lawsuit back in the day).

> I did find myself in a minority of one concerning this, nobody else I knew moved the menu bar from the bottom to the top.

Personally, I never really liked either -- and that got more pronounced with the modern trend of widescreen monitors. So I usually keep the taskbar on the left.