My question is why?
When they were implemented in UNE we had a great blog post by MPT about the reasoning:
http://design.canonical.com/2010/05/menu-bar/
It made sense. Netbooks have limited vertical space, UNE focuses one window at a time, global menus are a perfect fit.
At the same time Mark posted on his blog (
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/359) with the following quote:
"There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted
menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be very
far apart. Those questions are greatly diminished in the netbook
environment, by definition."
Again, clarifying that although they make perfect sense on netbook resolutions, they won't necessarily make sense on desktops.
Perhaps we could start removing menus, and specifying a standard, consistent way to do so (e.g. like Chrome). Perhaps the menus should appear in the huge space we've opened up to the right of the title bar. Perhaps there is another way to go, or perhaps we already have an optimal setup. We won't know without doing usability testing and making sure we aren't making a mistake.
Instead, we appear to be plagiarizing Apple's menubar just because we can. On top of that it currently won't be consistent as not all the common UI toolkits support it. So we are introducing inconsistency, and massive behavioural change that could very well be less optimal than our current solution, but without any concrete reasons.
To reiterate, I understand the reasoning for the global menu on netbooks, and I totally agree. Why is a global menu better on a modern high-resolution or multiple-monitor desktop than the current system?
Luke.