Maybe worthwhile to encourage a heavier reliance on right click menus going forward, then? Seems to make sense in a future VR world.

I have noticed that Mac Sequoia I'm running now has some memory as to which process last focused on each display and now is able to show a different menu per display, albeit grayed for displays where the user is not currently focused. It's a little janky, but kindof a graceful devolution of the original single menu vision.

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layer8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Context menus are specifically for actions on the particular thing you click on (for example a file in a file listing, or an object in a layout program). It still makes sense to have a separate application menu bar. But personally I think menu bars are really more intuitive attached to the application window rather than at the top of the screen, potentially relatively far away from the window.

With today’s wide screens, a vertical menu bar at the side would perhaps make more sense than the usual one at the top, though, similar to vertical tabs.

I don’t see a future VR world other than for casual use, because keyboard and mouse/trackpad will remain the highest-bandwidth way to interact with a computer.

	▲	dwoldrich an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's a good point about context sensitivity and the need for process-level controls needing a top level menu. I would say that part of the friction with window-level menus is moving targets. It's less cognitive effort to find and hit menu targets that are always in the same place on the screen. Part of the discoverability of menus is learning what actions are modal (titles have the ellipsis) and learning what hotkeys and key chords do what in the app. There's nothing faster than hotkeys. Ideally, users train themselves to use hotkeys to get work done and forego the menu except to discover additional features.
	▲	kps an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> With today’s wide screens, a vertical menu bar at the side would perhaps make more sense than the usual one at the top, though, similar to vertical tabs. That's what NeXTSTEP did for application menus, along with right-click context menus (which MacOS X did keep).
	▲	wtallis an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> With today’s wide screens, a vertical menu bar at the side would perhaps make more sense than the usual one at the top, though, similar to vertical tabs. Yes, please. Bring back the NeXTSTEP menus for desktops! But on laptops, it's still pretty common for almost all windows to be full screen most of the time, so having the menu bar at the top of the screen is still the best choice for that environment. That gap between what's best on a laptop and what's best on a desktop with large or multiple displays has been growing since desktop displays broke free of the 1080p but they were stuck in. But I don't think it's anywhere close to wide enough that Apple or Microsoft would be willing to implement different UI paradigms. It's hard enough getting them to understand that tablets and laptops need different UIs.

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wvenable 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm staring at a few apps on Windows right now and none of them even have menu bars (Firefox, Outlook, Spotify, Notepad, etc).