[Usability] Future of the menu top bar?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

Linux Format magazine June 2006 (LXF80) reported on comments Nat
Friedman[1] made in Paris:
... we developed an extension to Gnome that put a bar at the top, which
looked a little like Macintosh.  In our usability tests that we did last
year we discovered that the bar was a really bad idea.  It was confusing
to Windows users who were used to having just one bar at the bottom, and
confusing to Macintosh users who ere used to having one bar at the top and
it behaving completely differently.  So we'd written this thing that was
confusing to everyone, and hundreds of [usability test] videos later we
said, "Let's not do that!"

[Text quoted as directly and accurately as possible from Linux format
magazine.]

Neither Sun Microsystems nor Novell use the top bar.  They have not yet
attempted to push these changes back upstream.  This is especially
worrying since it was Ximian (now part of Novell) who proposed the topbar
in the first place.  It seems odd to carry on with this strategy when the
very people who proposed it are now saying it is a bad idea.

On a personal note, as someone who has been using Gnome since around 1.2
and various version of Microsoft before that so I happen to be more
comfortable without the topbar.  (If at some later date the GTK port to
Mac OS allowed a truely Macintosh style menubar I'd be interested to try
it having also used Macs in education.)  If I feel bothered enough to
change any of the defaults (rather than file a report trying to improve
the defaults) the first thing I usually change is to put down a custom
wallpaper and second to that is to use have a main menu on the bottom left
corner.

Okay so we have Novell and Sun in one corner using a more Microsoft style
layout.  In the other corner we have Ubuntu and others [2] who (mostly)
accept the current default layout.

Do we need to reconsider?

After we have discussed this I may bring this to the desktop-devel list
but deliberately did not crosspost since I wanted to avoid crosstalk as it
gets too disorganised and confusing and often ends up being counter
productive.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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[1] I've sent a Carbon Copy of this message to Nat as you can see from the
headers.

[2] I don't know for sure what other distributions accept the default
layout.  Please do tell if your preferred distribution accepts the default
panel layout.