Ubuntu desktop moving application menus back into application windows

Menus integrated within applications are coming to Unity in Ubuntu 14.04.

Canonical has come up with a replacement for the global menu bar, one of the most notable features of Ubuntu's Unity desktop and also one of its most problematic.

This releasethe first with 5-year long-term supportis rock solid.

"Despite displaying the menu contents outside of the window, the menus are still window-specific," we noted in a review of Ubuntu 12.04 in May 2012. "By design, the global menu bar displays the menu of the focused window. This proves awkward in some applications with dialogs and multiple windows."

The intent of moving application-specific menus into the global menu bar was to leave more room for content in applications. But even for people who liked the design, it has grown more problematic over time with the proliferation of bigger monitors, according to Canonical employee Marco Trevisan. The Ubuntu desktop team is bringing the application windows back into the application windows themselves for the 14.04 release in April this year, Trevisan wrote today.

Ubuntu developers wanted to "propose a solution to fix themain UX bugwe have [had] in Unity since its very first release: themenusbeinghard to findortoo far from their parent window," Trevisan wrote. "In fact, having the application menus in thetop panelreally worked very well in small screens but now, especially with HiDPI monitors getting more and more popular, the top panel could be reallytoo farfrom the actual window location."

The fix, which Trevisan credited to desktop user experience lead John Lea, is a new locally integrated menu for applications, similar to the design of pre-Unity versions of Ubuntu.

In a video, Canonical Engineering Manager Stephen Webb said, "We're putting the menus back where the windows are by adding them to the window title bar. You still have the increased content area but you have less work for your trackpad finger. As always, when you're not using them, the menus hide to reduce the visual clutter in your work area."

Ubuntu Unity Locally Integrated Menus.

"So, the first step has been moving away from the old gtk2-based decorations and writingbrand new decorationssupportingGtk3 CSS theminginsideUnity itself; this has been a huge work(including writing abrand-new widget systemfor handling compiz textures in a more natural way), but it gave usgreat benefitsin the end such as muchfaster windows resizing, [an]improvedlook, [and] support fordynamic scaling(for both HighDPI and accessibility reasons)."

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Ubuntu desktop moving application menus back into application windows