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Comment by happymellon | Hacker News Reader

Is a dumpster of features, you have no idea what you'll find in there.

Has someone hidden the zoom buttons in there? How about print? Perhaps that's also where save is, or tab colour? Most things in the hamburger menu are completely unrelated but exist for the removal of context. Button outlines so you have no idea what you can and cannot click on as well, which is mentioned in the fine article, are all modern design patterns. Looks over functionality.

Hamburger menu is just peak modern menus. Lazy.

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Yep. It's the miscellaneous everything bucket. It also seems to only be motivated by either scarce screen real estate (it first showed up in mobile interfaces), or graphic designers who think everything is "clutter" and by sweeping it away into the hamburger menu they can have their beautiful screenshot-worthy interface. I have a 27" monitor, but tons of websites and even Firefox itself hide half the functionality behind a hamburger.

Originally the top menu was to have a way to access to all functions. Many still do (say LibreOffice)

The hamburger is kind of a weird breed of design signaling because of it. In some desktop apps it still is the original top menu, but not always. On websites and apps it can vary tremendously.

However, a top menu is not an expert level mode, it’s a beginners / proficient level mode. Expert level means using keyboard shortcuts.

Context driven display and modes are far more valuable when meeting spacial constraints. But that can be hard when you are dealing with many form factors and so the quick fix is the hamburger.

> Expert level means using keyboard shortcuts.

This is true when you use only an editor and a debugger. When you need to use 10 programs each with its own keyboard shorcuts (which, BTW you need to search in internet which they are because the company doing the software did not bother to make them accessible in a help menu) you're gonna have a hard time. In the (1985) past you had for such things a holder attached to your keyboard where you had a listing of those keyboard shortcuts. Now the world has evolved and we have ... tada... the hamburger menu. P.S. I would not feel good as a developer to know that someone , somewhere curses me and my family constantly for the work i done.

which, BTW you need to search in internet which they are because the company doing the software did not bother to make them accessible in a help menu

At least on macOS and Windows the shortcuts are shown in the (traditional) menu bar. With GNOME's use of hamburgers, it's anyone's guess. As someone who likes shortcuts, I found it very hard to figure out shortcuts in GNOME apps that have a lot of functionality hidden away. (Aside from keyboard shortcuts not being very consistent between apps on Linux.)

In Excel 365 pressing ALT shows the shortcut key in the ribbon ( if enabled in options). The issue is that the ribbon looks now like google maps. In Edge pressing ALT sets the focus to the "...". What to do next is left as an exercise for the reader. In Teams, pressing ALT does nothing and the Help button has only "Themes", "News" and "Training" .

In Firefox, on Linux at least, when you press Alt you get a bar with all the standard File/Edit/View/History/Bookmarks/Tools/Help menus. In each menu and then in each item there's one letter underlined and it works as it should, so a sequence of Alt, h, a, will give you an About dialog (for example). The fact that the menu bar is not displayed by default doesn't bother me, because I don't use mouse to navigate the menus, and from keyboard I'd need the Alt key press anyway.

Slightly related: somehow, FF on Linux allows you to rearrange tabs from keyboard. Ctrl+Shift+PgUp/PgDown move the current tab left or right. As far as I can tell, this feature is only available on Linux. I have no idea why. It's much more convenient than dragging the tabs with mouse, because you don't have to worry about accidentally detaching the tab into its own window.

> Is a dumpster of features, you have no idea what you'll find in there.

I feel the same way about notifications. Both native notifications and notifications via e-mail.

It is no longer easy to find out if something changed or happened in most websites/applications. You must be bombarded with notifications all the time, and god forbid you take an extended break or something goes into your spam folder, because if you snooze you lose.

JIRA for me is the worst in this regard.

One of the first things I do with a fresh work inbox is set rules to push things into non-default folders. And then, I proceed to never look at them unless I'm digging for something.

61 unread notifications from Az Devops? Nah, I don't need to read those. I was watching that build in the background, I know it failed.

Mobile notifications should offer more filtering options at the system level. Why do I need to trust an app developer to respect my notification preferences? Why should I rely on the developer to build granularity into their push notification frequency?

It all gets simpler when you can filter at the 'inbox'.

So on desktop applications, I assume you prefer all your functions to be on toolbars, and you have similar disdain whenever you encounter a File menu? I guess if there's a lot of functions, you probably need some tabs on your toolbar- so the Office Ribbon interface is idyllic I assume?

The difference between a file menu and an hamburger icon is that the file menu hides file operations while the hamburger icon hides… anything. something. dead bodies.

Almost every desktop application has a File menu whether or not it deals with files. The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File? OBS has "Always on Top" as an option within "File".

Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think we should be banishing menus. The hamburger icon is just an iconic, space efficient way to say "menu"

There are guidelines for what should be in menu bars, what order the items should be in, and how they should behave for different sorts of application.

For example, on Mac: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

And on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-m...

> "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help?

On Mac, it should be in the "App" menu and called "Preferences...", it should be the first item in the menu, except if you have an "About YourAppName" item which always goes at the top with a seperator underneath.

On Windows, it should be in the "Tools" menu, and called "Options...". 4 On Linux, it should be under the "Edit" menu, and called "Preferences".

If it's not, then the app (in my opinion) is broken. Of course, many apps are lazily ported across platforms or "hamburgerized". The Windows situation is obviously also more messy because of the newer "ribbon" standards complicating things a bit, but there are right answers.

(edit: fixed links)

Of course there are ancient, rarely updated guidelines that almost all applications ignore. Microsoft indeed has that great guide, and yet their own applications implement it inconsistently, and often incorrectly according to the guidelines. Apple is a tad bit better, but third party apps rarely get it right. The best thing Apple has going for it is specifically on the question of where Settings is: there is a dedicated app menu, so it just makes logical sense to put Settings there. Or was it Preferences? Options.

> On Linux, it should be under the "Edit" menu, and called "Preferences".

This one is a stretch, there are no such consistent and agreed-upon guidelines.

My point here is that just because things can be abused (or even, in the case of desktop applications, are almost _always_ abused), doesn't mean the general concept is useless or should be removed from applications. I would recommend instead of trying to cram a hundred possible actions into a tiny icon bar at the bottom of your iPhone, or removing 97 of those actions from the app itself and leaving just the most basic three down there, to maybe consider building a sensible and well-arranged menu layout _if and when_ you need more than those three that you can fit at the bottom.

> Of course there are ancient, rarely updated guidelines

You mean well researched guidelines with tons of evidence behind their decisions [1] that are as relevant today as they were 20 years ago.

> almost all applications ignore.

That most current applications ignore because people think they are ancient rarely updated guidelines.

This is especially evident in the MacOS world. HIG were the guide on the platform, and developers tried to adhere to them. And then the new breed of "designers" took over and even Apple breaks nearly every single one of them [2]

Microsoft has always been worse when it came to enforcing consistency of user interfaces, but even their choices were never random until quite recently [3].

[1] Apple's original HIG even had a bibliography section because it was actual research, and not some Dribble showcase: https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/144740917559669965... and https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/144771024771228057... etc.

[2] See, e.g. their abomination of an App Store https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P

[3] Even the ribbon menus they introduced in Office weren't a random choice. They surely are now. See the Why the UI blog series: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...

> For example, on Mac: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

> And on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-m...

Both links return 404.

Somehow that feels about right.

They both work for me.

Wait, there's a standard for ribbon menus??? I thought that was just a horrible failed experiment that drove a huge number of people away from the MS suite towards Google Docs and was abandoned...

Originally it was a well-researched and executed concept, see https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...

Nowadays it's just a random hodge-podge no one knows how to use properly.

> The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File?

Does it ? This is the issue when people see no more as their own OS.

In the past, just like today, there were multiple modes to exit a program. One of them is to press Exit and the programm will exit cleanly. The other is to press the X in the window corner in Windows ( or send a close message from a window manager) which, depending on the implementation, might lose data. There is also the option to kill the process. Now in my opinion this Exit is a good thing and it is clear what is doing.

On macOS, both the Quit and Preferences items are consistently in the application menu (the menu left of "File" that has the name of the application). And the shortcuts are consistently Cmd + q and Cmd + ,

Well, unless it's an Electron app. Which is another good reason to avoid them altogether.

This is a problem of poor app design, not the stunning indictment of traditional menus that you seem to think it is.

A poor menu layout can be fixed. A hamburger menu will always be a byzantine mix of everything because everything has to be in there. There is no organization, except flyout menus--which were a problem with traditional menu designs, but you could organize without them.

Hell, some applications have just moved the traditional menu behind the hamburger. Why? Because that was a good way to organize operations, even if it wasn't perfect, or wasn't always perfectly implemented.

> The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File?

Happy to know I am not the only one who considers this weird.

It would probably make more sense to have an "Application" menu before "File". It could contain things like "About", "Help", "Setting" and "Exit". (Especially in cases where the current "Help" menu only contains "Show help" and "About". If it has more than five items, then I'd say it deserves a separate menu.)

The ribbon menu was actually a step in the right direction for desktop only UI paradigm

Declaring a tool good or bad because it's abused doesn't make sense.

I see what you mean. Brave on desktop comes to mind as an offender.

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