Menubar and Toolbar
User Interface (UI) concepts: The classic Menubar and Toolbar / Menu bar or part of W.I.M.P. design. WIMP computing denoting a style of interaction using elements of the user interface providing mouse-operated toolbars and menus to access its functions.
The menubar and toolbar provides unobtrusive dirct access to all the commands in an application while remaining out of the way of the core application work space. This allows for convenient execution for experts while providing guidance and education for novices. Exploring the menubar is how users learned about an application.
The Decline of Usability
The classic Menubar and Toolbar are being replaced by newer UI design elements such as:
- Ribbon
- Hamburger Menu
These modern replacements are not better, just different. The Ribbon menu was a studied attempt at being more efficient. The Google Hamburger Menu is a way to address different mentalities or the lazy lack of menu exploration enthusiasm in millennial and younger generations.
Quoted from an article by carl svensson, "Another apparently unfashionable UI standard is the menu bar. It used to be a lowest common denominator between platforms and, when still present, it works basically the same on Windows, Mac and Unix-likes. For the most part, it even keeps the traditional "File, Edit, View" approach to things. The Gnome designers, however, have decided that such menus are apparently a bad feature and they should probably never have been used in the first place. To rectify more than three decades of such folly, they have created... something I'm not sure what to call."
"One of the tricks up their sleeve is the hamburger menu. On smartphones, it's a great feature, but on the desktop, it's unnecessary: If there's anything we have on today's wide screen displays, it's horizontal space. In Gnome, it seems to be a catch-all for UI operations that didn't end up somewhere else."
Gnome Application menus or app menus
Application menus or app menus are the menus that you see in the GNOME 3 top bar, with the name and icon for the current app. All GNOME applications will have to move the items from its app menu to a menu inside the application window. Primary menu is the menu you see in the header bar and has the icon with three stacked lines, also referred to as the hamburger menu. If an application fails to remove the application menu by the release of GNOME 3.32, it will be shown in the app’s header bar, using the fallback UI that is already provided by GTK.
