>Now, with a menu bar you could reach the “About” dialog box with one single click, and dragging the mouse around. With this thing, you need at least three clicks, and you need to know where you have to click. A giant step backward with no apparent advantages.
This guy talks about some menu options like everyone accesses them 10 times a day. Who cares if 'About' is tucked away somewhere. Has anyone ever used the 'About' button in a browser? What for?
I much rather have a clean screen with fewer buttons than the 'About' button sitting there, never being used.
edit: read the other parts as well now and while some of it is nit-picky I recommend the series to all! worth a read.
It's not just about "About". I often want to revisit a web page and the same logic applies there. In Safari, the "History" menu is always right at the top of the screen. With a single click, I can look at recent pages, and hover over previous days.
In Firefox on Linux, I needed to learn to click on the bookshelf icon (?!) in the menu bar, then History. Then the menu acts like a wannabe iOS app and slides the history into the menu with an animation. It feels a lot more cumbersome for no good reason at all.
Both app and web designers have quickly understood that mystery meat navigation is a dead-end[1] now matter how clean it looks. I don't understand why the GNOME and elementary teams keep doubling down on it.
'My take-away from all of this is that if most of the user experience takes place in a single view, and it’s only things like user settings and options that need to be accessed in separate screens, then keeping the main UI nice and clean by burying those in a side menu is the way to go.'
That article is saying that A/B testing shows that if you have different content views etc then you should have visible navigation, if it's options then sure, tuck it away in a side menu. I don't think the History menu is a 'view' per se...
This guy talks about some menu options like everyone accesses them 10 times a day. Who cares if 'About' is tucked away somewhere. Has anyone ever used the 'About' button in a browser? What for?
I much rather have a clean screen with fewer buttons than the 'About' button sitting there, never being used.
edit: read the other parts as well now and while some of it is nit-picky I recommend the series to all! worth a read.