I can see why they did it. Now that screens are ~universally 16:9, vertical space is at a premium. It would be nice if the hamburger menu actually replicated the same functionality though.

I think that if vertical space were indeed the reason, then we wouldn't have huge, touch-sized widgets everywhere and 32-pixel titlebars. There are applications where simply reducing the padding on most widgets to sane values wins you 3-4 menubars' worth of space.

I'm sure vertical space is the most often-repeated argument, but I'm skeptical that it's indeed the reason behind this trend.

Firefox in particular is themable; mine is pretty compact.

16:9 is a ratio whereas the amount of vertical space is an absolute amount. I don't think the two are related, unless screens got wider at the expense of height, which surely is not the case.

They did lose height; 1600×1200 → 1920×1080. For a while you could find 1920×1200 if you looked hard and spent more, but at the next increment everything is 16:9.

I have 2 1920x1200 and there is no reasonable upgrade except maybe something like 40" 4K (and not in retina/high dpi mode). 2560x1600 would be ok, but it's too expensive.

3440x1440. Less pixels overall than your current setup, but incredibly nice to use. Also affordable, you can get them for under $400 during sales / end of year clearance.

Seriously, for coding I absolutely love a 1920x1080 screen rotated 90°. Still wide enough to see an entire (sane) line, but more vertical space is just wonderful. Can't watch video, obviously, but for a work computer the vertical space is the absolute best. Improves web browsing as well for most sites.

I tried a 36", I can't stand it as a display. Fine for a TV, but it's a little much for a monitor. Although I can't stand more than 2 displays, so YMMV.

I went to 3840x1600 - as wide as two Full HD screens but with a bit more vertical space and no bevel in the middle.

They did get wider at the expense of height. Monitors are sold by diagonal size, and a 15" 4:3 monitor is 9 inches tall while a 15" 16:9 one is only 7.4" tall.

I rarely use the menu bar so I just hit alt when I need it. I'd bet lots of users don't even know it exists though. Especially with Chrome hiding so many of their options

It's interesting that you turn on the menu bar. To me this isn't a "tablet" feature at all--it's just a "screen real estate is precious" feature. Even when hidden it's only an Alt press away.

We've got bigger higher resolution screens for every device, screen real estate is only getting less precious and we're still losing affordances like scroll bars and being able to see the top level of the menu hierarchy.

The screen real estate isn't particularly precious on a desktop / laptop with a large, high-resolution screen (much less precious than mobile, for sure), but I also like to get rid of menu bars, tool bars, etc. just because they're visual clutter, and like you say, a keyboard makes up for them.

Ironically, I do enable them on my tablet, because I don't always have a keyboard attached to it. Tablets generally have enough space for full menus / toolbars, and lacking a keyboard they're arguably the form factor most in need of them.

I use three 1440p 27" monitors and vertical real estate is still something I'd seriously inconvenience an adorable puppy for more of. If my desk was a little better-shaped for it and I didn't need a place to put speakers, etc., I'd go back to using at least one vertical display.

What I really wish for are 2000x2000-ish square screens, ~20 inch diagonal with minimal bezel, so that I can stack 3x2 of them and get to work at last instead of flipping wasting screen space and head movements on overly wide screens.

I always turn on the menu bar on the desktop. Screen real estate is valuable, but using some on a menu bar is a very worthwhile expenditure, in my opinion.

I know about the "Alt" key, but I find the need to press that to pop up the menu to be incredibly annoying.

I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for? I ask because I literally can't remember the last time I did in Firefox; everything's a keyboard shortcut. Fullscreen is F11, inspector is F12, refresh is F5 (even go-to-URL-bar is F6).

> I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for?

I use the menu really frequently -- for pretty much anything that isn't a toolbar button.

I tend not to use keyboard shortcuts generally, but particularly if I'm just reading a website -- in that situation, my hands are on the mouse, not the keyboard, and moving to the keyboard to type a shortcut is more inconvenient than just being able to use two clicks on a menu.

I pull down the History menu reasonably often. I'm one of the few people who still uses bookmarks too. I found that hitting alt was annoying and I'd forget about the menu and try to find stuff on the Hamburger menu instead and get annoyed.

Now that you mention it, I also use the history menu pretty frequently. I don't use the bookmark facility in browsers, though, because I run my own bookmark server (so I have access to my bookmarks no matter what computer or browser I'm using).

Maybe you know this already, but Firefox has shortcuts for both of those. History is Ctrl+H and bookmarks is Ctrl+B. Ctrl+Shift+H and Ctrl+Shift+B to get them in a separate window.

The Ctrl-H history opens up the annoying sidebar though, and then you have to click to expand. It's not as ergonomic as the menu. The Bookmarks have the same problem.

Huh. I use bookmarks a lot, too--but I use them via the omnibar. Type the first few letters and I'll find it from there.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Just put the History menu dropdown in the toolbar beside the hamburger menu.

go-to-URL-bar is also Ctrl+L which I tend to favor, for some reason

Also I miss typing ".." in the URL bar to go to my home page (I'll admit this was an iexplore quirk, albeit a really convenient one...)

Vertical bars would have enough space.

This must be a Linux/windows paradigm? I am lost looking at Firefox on my Mac.

Edit: apparently on PCs the per-window menu is activated with Alt, TIL

On Macs the menu bar is intact, same place it ever was, detached from the firefox window at the top of the screen. The hamburger menu on macos is basically redundant.

Agree! "Mobile First" design thinking should not mean "Mobile Only." What was supposed to be a call to consider all of the devices your users may be utilizing, it just transferred the preference from one type of device to another.

Why can't we just have sites/apps/SPAs/whatever that look and work well on whatever device they supposedly support?

> Why can't we just have sites/apps/SPAs/whatever that look and work well on whatever device they supposedly support?

Indeed. There seems to be a weird idea that it's possible to make a UI that works well on all form factors. I don't see how that's possible, and I've never seen it happen in practice.

What actually happens is that you have a UI that works well on one form factor and badly on the others, or you have a UI that works poorly on them all.

I think NYTimes.com is a good example. Theres a hamburger menu that expands to the whole screen when on mobile or tablet; its a sidebar on desktop. The whole arrangement of articles becomes linear on mobile; it isnt on desktop. It looks like someone figured out how it should look at every state, and then developed a way to gracefully switch between them -- not that it was a mobile UI that someone decided to enlarge on desktop.

This is why we have media queries in CSS!

This is one of my favorite parts of OS X, and it's sad that there aren't many Linux DEs doing it: the persistent menu bar. It's always expected that it be right at the top of the screen, and utilized. Firefox and Chrome, by default, have survived hamburgerization...because it can't be hidden. Sure, an application that doesn't use it at all (yuck) can just not implement anything beyond the application name menu, but something like a browser has no choice but for the bar to be visible.

I guess, we may be confident to see the menu bar dissappear in a not so distant future iteration of OS X. With a bit of bad luck and some rather cynical retroverse distortion, it may be replaced by a Hamburger (as in the Xerox Star Interface, which introduced it to indicate the anchor for the single menu in the entire system.)

Placing the cursor in text by imitating the new cursor catch and place game of iOS will be also fun. Probably so much fun that quite a number of people will stay longer in the office to play with it.

That said, the menu bar has already taken serious damage by the introduction of OS X, when the first menu item became the variable width application name. Before this, the File and Edit menus and their essential menu items were exactly on the same place in every application, rendering the most essential commands a matter of muscle memory, quite like a guesture.

Good god, and I'm over here living like a plebe thinking I had to just deal with the hamburger.

Thank you to the poster below for the "alt" shortcut and for reminding me I can change the settings!

I don't have a problem with the concept of the hamburger except what they put in it is less useful than the menu bar.

There is a style of roundabout called a hamburger roundabout. It's controlled by lights, and has a two-way lane running straight through the middle.

I don't drive much, these days; but even as a passenger, they do my head in. No More Hamburgers! Boo!

> My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one!

Game over. Do you want to play another game?

(...you know - material ui is the new shit. I wonder what are they smoking, i would _love_ to try it too)

Not only that but a big pitch of the tablet itself is to get the desktop web browsing experience.