Global menus only make sense in an environment where only one application is on screen at once. This is especially true when you throw in "focus follows mouse"and you have to cross another application on the way to the global menu.

What I really hate lately is the iconification of menus, be it ribbon or that firefox abomination. Having to learn a different set of hieroglyphs for each application is a terrible UX. This is taking the form over function approach that has long plagued media players (still does with spotify and netflix) and bringing it to all applications.

Humans are much better at scanning through justified lists of text, this was our fast lookup method long before computers existed.