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Comment by wwalexander | Hacker News Reader

Icons in menu bars serve the same purpose as icons elsewhere: quickly identifying buttons. I don't know why this is such a big deal.

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It's one for one or two items to have icons. The vegetarian dishes on a restaurant can have the leaf icon for instance. But it would be stupid if every single dish did. The whole point is that icons pop out so putting them on EVERY item is just counterproductive.

What about toolbars? Those almost universally have both text and icons for each item. Why should menus be any different?

Toolbars (pre office-ribbon design era) were understood to only have frequently used items which are the ones that also happen to have icons. Then the office-ribbon thing happened, and everyone complained about that because it meant everything had to have an icon and everyone had to memorize what every icon meant (I’m exaggerating slightly)

Toolbars already focus on the most-used actions one wants to perform. A menu contains everything.

The main problem with icons is that they need to be universally understood, otherwise they are a usability issue. In the past, this was achieved through Skeuomorphism and consistency across software.

However, as time has gone on Skeuomorphism has lost value, because people don’t necessarily recognize the old things they’re trying to reference. So we’ve been seeing a movement away from that for the past 10 years. But, then we run into another issue: the icons are new, and therefore unknown if not obvious. In addition, every software company seems to go their own way and have their own “style”, which is actually a big problem because users have to keep an absurd amount of iconography in their minds to use all their day to day software.

Text solves this, because text can inherently be read.

> In addition, every software company seems to go their own way and have their own “style”

Hence Apple using the same set of SF Symbols across all their platforms. And I don't think icons are intended to be used to initially identify the purpose of a button, but instead to provide a quick visual anchor once you are already familiar. Sure, there are some buttons that everyone will use more (like Save or Open), but I don't think there's anything wrong with allowing every button to have this sort of quick visual lookup. Predicting user behavior is hard.

But they don’t actually, Apple will use different icons for the same function across their platforms (and even on the same platform across applications!) That was part of the problem with the menu icons.

The other issue is the few icons that existed before Tahoe generally highlighted import or more frequently used actions. And acted as a visual anchor point so if you frequently used another item you know, "it's 2 items below the save which has the save icon"

When everything has an icon it all just becomes clutter and no one is going to waste their time trying to parse tiny glyphs that are inconsistent between apps anyway. You could try to figure out which of the 4 icons with a plus button is the "New X" option you're looking for, but you'll probably just be reading the titles anyway so the icon does nothing.

Or when you're asked to perform a task remotely or whatever, with a user who uses a language other than English. You WILL appreciate icons.

Did you read the article? They give great examples.

Yes, I have been listening to Gruber complain about them for a year now. His critique is that "Apple's HIG used to say not to," not anything about what actually makes them bad.

Curiously, I haven't heard him talk about Apple Intelligence in Shortcuts, or any of the cool new features in Tahoe. Design is how it looks, I guess.

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