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Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

>Please get rid of that top panel.... This is just bad UX.

How so? It displays useful info at a glance. Where's the bad UX?

Not sure what Googlebook is, but in general: I want to be able to move my pointer to the top right corner and click to close the window.

And before you make some claim like "use keyboard", the UI includes these window elements for a reason. Top bar makes them less friendly to use: They're tiny and with top bar it's an aiming game instead of a quick way to do something with a mouse or a touchpad.

As an i3/sway user I don't greatly care about this because I already have things the way I like, but I understand the frustration of the OP.

and I'd like to be able to move my cursor to the top edge of the screen to click tabs without worrying about where my cursor is on the y-axis, only x. we've completely forgotten about Hot corners and hot edges...

There is actually a concept called Fitts' Law that just describes what you said.

When tabs are placed against the very top edge of the screen, the top edge effectively acts as a target with infinite height (Y-axis), making it very easy to reach.

Apple and Microsoft both apply this concept in their OS, just to different elements (close button or menu bar).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

Yeah, this is the extension of the above. Main reason tabbed windows ditched the title bar in favor of having tabs integrated into it.

Unfortunately people who design UI or produce specs are not power users so the end products have been losing utility at an incredible pace.

My personal favorite is an input field which clears its content once it loses focus. So when inputting an address on mobile you can't switch back and forth to copy different parts of it.

> How so? It displays useful info at a glance. Where's the bad UX?

That info can be shown in the bottom panel, there is enough space there.

That one now should not exist (like in plain Gnome).

Existing ChromeOS can show the same information just fine in the bottom right corner without eating away all that extra space.

Read the sentence before the fragment you quoted:

> in macos it is menu bar that host app menus but that concept doesn't exists in these other desktops and yet they have a top panel

Yeah I read it but it doesn't help me understand why it's considered bad UX, hence why I asked for clarification.

What isn't clear? Throwing your mouse to the top of screen to access your app's menus doesn't work when your app's menus aren't at the top of the screen.

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