[Usability] The Future of Window Borders, Menu Bars, and More

[Allan Caeg <allancaeg gmail com>]

Let's try this again.

Upstream people are innovating when it comes to the menu bars and window borders. This is very obvious in popular web browsers: Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. Chrome is so liberal that it draws its own window border. 

Opera guys could be limited by the Linux desktop conventions and technical limitations so they settled with this.

As for Firefox, their UX guys respect the platform's conventions so they didn't add the Firefox button to Firefox 4 Beta (yet, at least). They're also limited by technical issues so they can't provide the option to add it yet.

The issue is great cross-platform apps are replacing the menu bar with a menu button (Firefox Button for Firefox, Opera button for Opera, and some unnamed button for Chrome) and tweaking the window borders. However, they're limited in the Linux desktop because of technical and UX issues. Tweaking the window border and menu bar break things and violate conventions. 

Conventions in Windows and OS X are evolving (see the ribbon interface and app buttons on Office, Paint, etc.) while the Linux desktop is limited (probably) because we can't make new things work everywhere (different window managers, desktop environments, etc.).

What do we do about this? People involved in the Windicators project (I'm not) may know something that could help.

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Regards,
Allan
http://www.google.com/profiles/AllanCaeg#about

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