Comment by modeless

Elements on the top of the screen have virtually infinite height, and elements in the corners have infinite height and width. You can't aim "too high" for something at the top of the screen.

Status bars on top don't make sense if you have tabs on top. Now your tabs are infinitely smaller, and aiming at them requires a lot more effort.

Mac's original design had the menubar on top, and its windows didn't have tabs, so it all worked fine together. That's not the case for browsers with tabs on top.

Along the way, it seems most designers have forgotten about Fitt's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law#Implications_for_U...

Auto-hide the task bar at the bottom, and you've basically got the Gnome UI. Works just fine. It's the permanent screen reservation of the double task bar that really eats up the usable desk space.

Samsung's task bar (when you enable the DeX integration on a tablet) also supports this and it makes for a fine user experience.

Edit: I've enabled "force desktop mode" on my Pixel 9 Pro and hooked it up to my laptop dock. The UI looks almost exactly the same already. Taskbar at the bottom, notification bar at the top.

It's clearly experimental; my ultrawide screen scales horribly, my keyboard app gets horribly confused, and interacting with the top bar triggers a full-screen tablet overlay that looks a bit weird.

However, Chrome opens multiple windows and browses just fine. There are right-click menus, mouse hover interactions, window resizing features (though some apps require the "force resizable activities" flag). Ethernet Just Works, audio/video just works, and I can operate my phone screen while working in dock mode (so apps that absolutely refuse to work can still be operated through the touch screen).

For me the only feature I want from a taskbar/status bar is ability to hide it permanently so it never comes out until I press a key on a keyboard (like meta/Windows key or even a key combination if needed). Task bar auto popping just because you weren't precise with your mouse and moved it too far down or to the corner is very annoying to me. I treat it as a test if desktop environment have "we will force our way down your throat" or "we try to make it great for everyone" attitude. Windows and Apple are choosing the former. KDE is choosing the latter.

I am surprised because somehow they get it on phones (hidden by default, needs a gesture to bring down). Real estate on a laptop is a just as precious, especially vertical real estate.

What I don't get is why they don't design UIs with a status bar on the side - you have so much waster horizontal real estate both in landscape monitors, with every website, code editor having huge bars on the either side of the text.

Smartphones are portrait screens and its clear that having only that much horizontal real estate is enough.

I would put all bars at the top. On a touch-enabled screen it's much easier to touch something at the top than something next to the keyboard, so I move the taskbar to the top on all my Windows two-in-ones.

Shout out to https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher for forcing this behavior even on Windows 11.

And ChromeOS is designed for Chrome's tab bar, so that it is at the top edge of the screen, essentially making it infinitely tall. This is one of the things that makes surfing the web more pleasant and ChromeOS then on Windows and Mac.

With many linux window managers you can move the statusbar to the bottom, hide the titlebar and configure chrome to use the (now hidden) system titlebar for the same effect.

Agreed. Those few little icons at the top are wasting an entire row on the screen. That junk can go in the corner of the taskbar like Windows.

Agree. They should make the desktop UI similar to what is there on ChromeOS or Samsung Dex. The top bar doesn't make sense at all.

I think that the first smartphones were way smaller than today’s ones played a role. They were not that elongated either, the aspect ratio was way closer to a square. I could easily reach the top bar back then. It was definitely not a hurdle. But of course that’s not true for a long time now.

Samsung did not forget, and did it right with DeX.

They did, however, get some of the interactions wrong (not to mention, handling of display resolution), so in the end, you can't exploit Fitt's Law in DeX either.

iOS did exactly this and it’s so much better for usage