The one benefit I can see is to gain some extra vertical space on the skinny 16:9 screens, especially now that the task bar in windows 11 got thicker and can no longer be moved to a side. They, of course, still haven't gotten around to fixing the auto-hide behavior, so that's still not an option.

The rare times I have to use windows, I use edge and I quite like the vertical tabs. This allows for a usable title bar, too.

Then get some Allgemeinbildung before you spout off on the "enlightenment", or lack thereof, of others.

Windows was perfectly usable on 15" 4:3 screens. The first iMacs were 15" 4:3.

So that as such probably wasn't the issue.

http://www.displaywars.com/24-inch-16x9-vs-15-inch-4x3

What might be an issue though is the use of laptops.

http://www.displaywars.com/15,4-inch-16x9-vs-15-inch-4x3

Only to waste it on the ridiculously big search ribbon. See the current Thunderbird.

There is: more space for content, e.g. websites while not removing directly accessible functionaly

But title bars are mandatory, so that's why not.

What does that even mean? That's the whole point of the discussion - standard UI elements have been bastardized so much, might as well just keep the trend going.

If there is a clean way to get rid of it, then sure that's a good option for some programs. (But there are a couple bits that you need to keep.)

But to ask "why even have it" is to fall into a discussion more about backwards compatibility than design.

No, it is a question about design. Window environments like Windows 11, macOS, Gnome or lots of other Linux window managers are designed for desktop PCs, not tablets. I would include Laptops under desktop PCs for this discussion, since most people -- that are working the whole day on their laptop -- add one or more screens to it. And on those large modern displays, it is more effective than ever to use overlapping non-fullscreened windows. Then it is absolutely necessary to have good standardized UI components to manage those windows. But those customized title bars break that standardization and customization. On modern Gnome I often have to search for the window that is in focus. It used to be clearly visible with a significant color difference in the titlebar. Today, there is slight difference in gray shading. That is ridiculous. And half of modern programs redefine the colors of their title bars, so you have to know for earch application which shade of gray stands for focus and which stands for not in focus. This is fucking stupid.

First and worst offender against this basic Windows guideline: Microsoft Office.

"Real" title bars can be removed if not needed (e.g. by switching to another windowing manager like dwm on Linux with X11; not sure how it's done in Wayland or in Windows but there must be a way).

"Crowded" title-bar from Gnome can't be easily removed, because they are not managed by the window manager.

They're mandatory because they're the way to move the window with your mouse. So fucking them up with a bunch of stuff that hinders that is just as bad as not having them in the first place.

Congratulations, you've circumvented the mandatory requirement!

Which is just as bad as disregarding it in the first place.

That's a screenshot across the entire width (of the top) of my monitor, as you can see from NP++ being maximised behind MS Word. Pretty darn busy, isn't it?

Sure, I can clean it up quite a bit, I can find out how to customise that. But naive users? They'll probably freak out. (And, TBF, I just noticed you can grab on to at least some of those busy-looking fields and drag it. But I only noticed that just now, while futzing around to screenshot it. And again, would my Mom? Or yours?) No, on the whole: What large software providers do to the Windows ittle bar nowadays is shit. The larger, the shittier. So of course Microsoft itself is worst of them all.

Works really well when the window's title bar has been moved offscreen for some reason.

IBM's CUA for the win. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar.

But also: > Chesterton's Fence >>The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'

There are always pros and cons to every design decision. As technology develops, we create new tools to interact with an ever-expanding content base. By moving things to the title bar, you gain back some real estate that you can dedicate to this ever expanding set of other tools and content.

There are other design paradigms that can be used for this, but it's a fairly simple (and naive) implementation / solution to this problem to move some of the stuff to the title bar which (visually) appears to be wasted space. But visual space != interactive space, so

But the loss of the title bar causes actual pain and interferes with practical use. It's hard to imagine any tools/content that would be worth that loss.

document-name-dropdown, search-box, username, user-icon.

Elements that do not allow dragging the window, because they react to mouse-down, include:

application-icon, quick-access-toolbar, notifications-bell-icon, and the standard titlebar icons.

Maybe the addition of dedicated Move button next to the minimise, maxmimise and close button would be a reasonable compromise?

That would provide a consistent target to click on with your mouse. Obviously a button is a lot smaller than the entire titlebar for clicking on, so there would be some efficiency loss for people that regularly move windows (I am one of them). Getting move use out of the titlebar space would be worth the minor inconvenience of a more accurate click-drag to move operation.

This does become more problematic when there are so many tabs they become tiny and the whole title bar of the browser is taken up by tabs so that there's no dead-space to drag the entire browser window to another screen. I try to keep minimal contexts (due to personal brain capacity issues), so I don't run up against this very often - I manage links that I want to keep and go back to using other means, or if I forget them then they weren't very important in the first place.

https://github.com/StackWM