This is what you lose when you take a team developing a desktop OS and move it under a team doing a mobile OS.
This is what you lose when you take a team developing a desktop OS and move it under a team doing a mobile OS.
Status bars on top don't make sense if you have tabs on top. Now your tabs are infinitely smaller, and aiming at them requires a lot more effort.
Mac's original design had the menubar on top, and its windows didn't have tabs, so it all worked fine together. That's not the case for browsers with tabs on top.
Along the way, it seems most designers have forgotten about Fitt's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law#Implications_for_U...
On my laptop's FHD screen it's even better.
> The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which always places the menu bar on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current program's windowframe.
I guess now that the browser is the one app you probably spend the most amount of time in, it might make a little less sense? Android's lack of a menu bar system makes it make very little sense there.
Since it only works well for maximised apps, the UX is much better if you just merge the menu into the title bar of apps.
Speaking from 20+ years of Windows use with a local menu bar and 7 years of Linux desktop where I switched to a global menu bar—-it was an instant improvement in quality of life.
I no longer have to hunt for a narrow menu bar strip, just throw the mouse all the way up, and hope to never hunt for it ever again.
Samsung's task bar (when you enable the DeX integration on a tablet) also supports this and it makes for a fine user experience.
Edit: I've enabled "force desktop mode" on my Pixel 9 Pro and hooked it up to my laptop dock. The UI looks almost exactly the same already. Taskbar at the bottom, notification bar at the top.
It's clearly experimental; my ultrawide screen scales horribly, my keyboard app gets horribly confused, and interacting with the top bar triggers a full-screen tablet overlay that looks a bit weird.
However, Chrome opens multiple windows and browses just fine. There are right-click menus, mouse hover interactions, window resizing features (though some apps require the "force resizable activities" flag). Ethernet Just Works, audio/video just works, and I can operate my phone screen while working in dock mode (so apps that absolutely refuse to work can still be operated through the touch screen).
The dock would also better if it weren't stretched to the entire screen width by default but perhaps Google is planning to use that space for something. It's also possible they're going to remove the top bar at some point, that'd make the UI standard Windows-shaped.
The Gnome trick for the dock is to only show the dock when hitting the Super button which also brings up the virtual desktops and what macOS might call Launchpad (except not full screen by default). Ubuntu likes to force the dock on you the way macOS does, but you can disable that.
Designers in the remaining 80% of the computing world have to do with what is available.
I am surprised because somehow they get it on phones (hidden by default, needs a gesture to bring down). Real estate on a laptop is a just as precious, especially vertical real estate.
Smartphones are portrait screens and its clear that having only that much horizontal real estate is enough.
Shout out to https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher for forcing this behavior even on Windows 11.
With many linux window managers you can move the statusbar to the bottom, hide the titlebar and configure chrome to use the (now hidden) system titlebar for the same effect.
They did, however, get some of the interactions wrong (not to mention, handling of display resolution), so in the end, you can't exploit Fitt's Law in DeX either.