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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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...)

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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