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dwoldrichyesterday at 6:34 PM2 repliesview on HN

Apple famously abandoned per-window menus per Fitt's law[1]. Wiki[2] says:

> Apple experiments in GUI design for the Lisa project initially used multiple menu bars anchored to the bottom of windows, but this was quickly dropped in favor of the current arrangement, as it proved slower to use (in accordance with Fitts's law). The idea of separate menus in each window or document was later implemented in Windows and is the default approach in most Linux desktop environments.

I recall hearing a quote that said Jobs called the menu the ultimate discoverability tool in the designer's arsenal, but I couldn't find the quote.

I am thankful for the menu junk drawer in Firefox. Better to give me everything I can discover in a menu rather than make a zillion fugly buttons and cluttering up the chrome. Although, anything that isn't frequently used by users should at least go under a few submenus to echo OP's criticisms. If Copy Clean Link is the "right" thing to do for users, then make "Copy Raw Link" a sub-menu item.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menu_bar


Replies

evikstoday at 2:59 AM

> Better to give me everything I can discover in a menu

Of course you're not given everything, that'd be hundreds of items

> rather than make a zillion fugly buttons and cluttering up the chrome.

This isn't the only alternative

> menu the ultimate discoverability tool

It isn't very discoverable, there is no search and no good convenient contextual explanation of what the options are

So a failure across all your metrics

layer8yesterday at 8:54 PM

Fitts’s law for menu bars made sense on a 12” monitor back then, but not so much on today’s large displays.

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