Why not a Menu Bar?

Did this get fixed? I use DESKTOP/LAPTOP and was so annoyed with NEWBrave’s not having the TOP MENU (File - Edit - View…) that I uninstalled NEWBrave and went back to OLDBrave… Now I get a WARNING(!!!) that I can only use OLDBrave for nine more days… So, will it disappear? Well, if NEWBrave has not been fixed, AIN’T GONNA USE IT. Has the TOP MENU (File - Edit - View…) been restored?

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…just to support so many previous postings: without the menu bar I prefer ol’ firefox as slow and overloaded as it may be…

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You’d think the devs would get that following the latest fad by morons (yes, morons) that make the user conform to the app rather than the other way around is a very bad idea. Particularly given the circumstances that led to Brave existing. :wink:

Simply put: GET. THIS. FIXED.

It’s a real shame, when on a Mac this is a must have browser. I even like it on iOS and Android. Won’t touch it on Windows until this issue is resolved.

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I am appalled that a menu bar isn’t an option. Some of us who are more old school and aren’t obsessed with getting every millimeter of screen real estate prefer the traditional navigation. Looks like I still can’t move away from Firefox just yet, which I’m fine with, been using it since 2004 and it never steered me wrong until the Extensions expiring fiasco a few weeks ago.

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Am I the only one that genuinely just doesn’t understand why this is a big deal?

The consensus seems to be that the added click it takes to open the “hamburger” menu just takes too much time in a PC interface. But if you really wanted to save time in a PC interface, why wouldn’t you just use the keyboard shortcut? That’s always WAY faster than clicking around whether we’re talking about a “classic” or a “hamburger” menu.

I’m baffled… :thinking:

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Hear hear!

I also miss the menu bar. I’m one of the old fogeys (and there is A LOT of us out there) who like their menus where they can see them. Yeah, I dig the appeal of the new “clean” look for those young whippersnappers but I can tell you that a menu bar is the first thing someone used to firefoxes and whatnots looks for, especially if the person is primarily a desktop user (and again, there are A LOT of us out there). Transition would be much easier with a menu bar in place, and facilitating transition is what is important at this stage of the project.

So, a definite +1 for menu bar.

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Of course you are baffled. I’m baffled that some people prefer strawberry icecream to chocolate one. But if I were to run an icecream shop I’d definitely offer both.

I despise how mobile design is creeping onto desktops. It’s godawful. Bitchute for example is suffering terribly because of it. I simply cannot stand how godawful it looks on my huge desktop monitor and how much scrolling and clicking I have to do to perform simple functions that I don’t even have to think about in youtube. I’d really like some “design genius” to please explain to me how a design philosophy based on a tiny 5’’ touch screen is somehow better for 30’’ mouse and keyboard setups than UI that was built and evolved over decades specifically for that environment? I’ve got an acre of screen real estate and I want to cover it with stuff, knobs and dials and I want everything to be within easy reach. This is what desktops and laptops are FOR - and not to try and ape an INFERIOR environment that is your phone. This blight of design “minimalism” is what is holding back a lot of alt-tech companies - in another example I spend a lot less time on Minds than I could simply because it’s suffering from a terminal case of “mobilitis” - just scroll and scroll and scroll and squint at the screen because text is somehow bad now… it’s all about tiny tiny icons with huge swathes of “whitespace” (or “deadspace” as i call it) - it’s godawful both visually and ergonomically compared even to the otherwise dreadful facebook which at least functions properly in PC environments.

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Mobile design is a factor in a lot of design decisions, but it’s not just that. I hide toolbars/menus every opportunity I can in any app that I can on my desktops and laptops precisely because they have the benefit of a keyboard. I can’t remember the last time I actually “clicked” a menu in any program I use regularly or even my OS. Keyboard shortcuts render mouse-based menus irrelevant; anyone truly concerned with “speed/convenience” on a desktop or laptop learns keyboard shortcuts. I’d rather have that screen real estate for actual content than boundless clickable menu options–I’ve got 6 different windows open & scattered across my 2k 27in monitor right now.

It’s definitely a preference thing. Clearly anyone who wants to use a mouse to click around can do so! To each their own. But mousing around menus is not ever faster or more convenient than keyboard shortcuts. And I think you’ll see old-style menus largely gone from all devices in the next 5-10 years; that’s just the way UI design is going. I don’t fault Brave for doing what Chrome, Edge, & Firefox have already done. All major browsers have a similar hamburger-ish menu now.

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Now look you hipster. I’ve been using keyboard “shortcuts” way before there were even mice around. What you call “shortcuts” wasthe only way of doing things and you know what? It sucked. It sucked real hard.
You know what a “shortcut” is ? It is an ALTERNATIVE way of doing things. If you don’t have the main road, shortcuts becomes pointless - or to be more precise, your whole traffic infrastructure is inferior because it’s all built on shortcuts, there are no main thoroughfares that can take the bulk of traffic. And again, don’t you go teaching me what a goddamn keyboard is.

As for all menus being gone in 5-10 years… Good luck with that. It’s a stupid hipsterish fashion that is bound to fail in the end because humans are what they are. You cannot change it. I’m a professional user and when I do professional work a hamburger menu or a shortcut only system is an automatic garbage bin for me. There is a reason why professional cameras have all the “uncool” knobs and dials all over them and why a professional editing station does not have touch screens but big fat knobs and physical sliders. Professionals require maximum comfort, maximum intuitiveness from their equipment so they can fully concentrate on the work itself. And “minimalism” is not comfortable. Not in the least. It is a kind of cynical affectation, a mannerism that it purports to oppose - like modernist architecture, pretending to be functional while pointedly ignoring its main function - people living there.
But to return to “minimalist” UI/UX. Humans like to see what they are doing, to feel what they are doing with their hands. Humans like to be in (perceived) control of their environment, and a hamburger menu or a shortcut “system” is not it. I could write books on the decadence of modern utility design, how it all started with Jobs’s drive to turn computers into TVs and appliances for the “masses” which then created a need for cryptic hipsterish shortcut cult. All in order to compensate for the artificial problem that was already solved a long time ago. “Yeah, let’s remove all the menus and buttons, it’s CLEANER now” (btw, in psychology obsession with “cleanness” is a strong indicator of psychotic personality, and Jobs was as clear an example of a psychotic personality as ever graced a medical textbook) but now we cannot do anything… I know, let’s put in cryptic shortcuts that hipsters have to learn by heart! And that will tie them to the particular piece of software because who would switch to competing software if they’d have to learn all the new shortcuts!"
So you start with the desire to make everything simple and easy and end up with something that is needlessly complicated and convoluted. You start with a universal visual language which enables users to engage with amazingly wide array of software and end up with a tower of babylon of competing systems and standards for each particular piece of software. And why? So you can show off to your teacher/employer how many “shortcuts” you have learned by heart? And that will make you “better” at what you do? Well don’t come looking for work in my company…
Despicable. This design philosophy is a just a fad. In 5 to 10 years people will be looking at today’s UX design with pretty much the same horror as we view web sites from the nineties. “What were these people thinking?!?”

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And why do we have to follow a fad, again? Why not make it OPTIONAL?

This “It’s better because we say so” is a load of BS. Each user is different and has different preferences.

Just how are you going to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate your bookmarks, eh? You really telling me hammering that down arrow is faster than just clicking it? When you’re opening several bookmarks, that extra click all adds up. If you use a keyboard shortcut to open the menu, you’re mousing over it to click what you need anyway, so shortcuts are irrelevant.

Regardless, great if you prefer that mode! I prefer different. Why can’t we have an option that suits BOTH again? Especially in a brand new browser.

Following hipster trends is the worst way to go, especially with something like UI, which is subjective. Why only please half your users when you can literally please both? We can already detect what device you’re using, so why not enable a menu bar only on desktops. Don’t tell me “it’s too much work”, when we’ve been programming them just fine for YEARS.

This just smacks of a “change it for the sake of it, look at all the cool NEW things we’ve done!” mentality.

This is LITTERALLY the main thing stopping me from using the Brave browser! (The other being the Alzheimer’s script blocker, but that’s for another topic…)

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It seems pointless to argue further about the “need” for a menu. :man_shrugging:

But you are a little off with the way bookmarks work when using keyboard shortcuts. Bookmarks are the first options that load in the omnibar when typing, so I don’t ever have to actually click anything. I start my day every day after opening Brave by hitting ctrl+n (or ctrl+t if I want a tab), typing 2 or 3 characters of URL of the bookmark I want to open (which auto-populates the address in the omnibar), and hitting enter. I can open dozens of bookmarks that way in just a couple seconds without clicking anything. At most, I may have to hit tab once or twice to cycle through bookmark options in the omnibar if I type something unspecific that applies to more than one bookmark. It’s extremely fast; try it sometime. :grinning:

(It even works with whatever you title the bookmark–if you decided to save your email inbox URL as “blueberry” in your bookmarks, you could open it by typing ‘blu,’ hitting tab, and pressing enter.)

And I’ve never said use keyboard shortcuts to open the menu; that would be a bit silly and clearly go against my argument–I don’t hit ctrl-shift-b to open my bookmarks bar and then mouse around in it (although I will ctrl-shift-o to organize them occasionally). I’m saying you can do whatever you intended to do in the menus without opening any of them at all if you know the keyboard shortcuts. The only thing I really use my mouse for in a browser is interacting with the content within a page or moving my browser windows around on my desktop. I have the most of the keyboard shortcuts for both Chrome/Brave & Firefox memorized after years of use.

I’ll fully admit that my power-user habits run deep: I don’t even use the mouse to do things in Windows, really. (I tap the Windows key & type whatever app/program I’m wanting to open, press enter; I open the explorer by hitting win+e, task manager by hitting ctrl-shift-esc, etc.) That level of depth may not be for everyone, but the keyboard is intuitively faster even for novices. Who really prefers to use contextual right clicks for copy/paste commands instead of ctrl+c/v? If the goal is to do things as quickly/conveniently as possible, the keyboard is just about always the way to go. :wink:

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[quote=“AfricaGroundhog, post:43, topic:39694”]
But you are a little off with the way bookmarks work when using keyboard shortcuts. Bookmarks are the first options that load in the omnibar when typing, so I don’t ever have to actually click anything. I start my day every day after opening Brave by hitting ctrl+n (or ctrl+t if I want a tab), typing 2 or 3 characters of URL of the bookmark I want to open (which auto-populates the address in the omnibar), and hitting enter. I can open dozens of bookmarks that way in just a couple seconds without clicking anything. At most, I may have to hit tab once or twice to cycle through bookmark options in the omnibar if I type something unspecific that applies to more than one bookmark. It’s extremely fast; try it sometime.[/quote]

Good for you! That works just fine if you lead an incredibly structured life, where you open many of the same bookmarks day after day across all your gazillions of lovely big, expensive monitors… Now what do you do when you need to access them ad-hoc, and you have a LOT of bookmarks saved (in folders of course), that you might not necessarily know the name of? (Since you don’t use those specific ones so often), what do you do when you have many that are of a similar name?

I keep most of my business stuff in categorised folders, it’s impossible to memorise every single ID, and other ones share similar characters. Your method would absolutely not work with that, nor does the stupid ****** burger menu, where I have to do extra clicks and movements for every single one I need to open (when I need them), plus the size of the menu itself is smaller due to opening as a sub-menu, halfway down the screen.

You must realise that not everyone on this planet is AfricaGroundhog, people have different situations and different needs and different times for accessing something. This “well this way of doing it is better, so EVERYONE should!” without thinking of different contexts is exactly why this hipster design methodology of “one way, across all devices” fails.

I’m all for consistency, that’s general good design practice, but ignoring other contexts, removing OPTIONS and enforcing similarities across devices that are vastly different is completely wrong.

Simply put, give a bloody menu bar, (like we used to have in every single application before now, so it’s not exactly hard to do) and EVERYONE is happy.

Why you’re arguing against that situation is beyond me. Your way works for a very specific few people in a very specific situation. OPTIONS are what cover all bases. Having a menu bar, (switched off by default) will harm literally no-one, but help many.

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You’re assuming I DON’T have almost a thousand bookmarks organized into various nested folders… But if it was important for me to be able to quickly click through them all regularly, I would leave the bookmarks bar on, not go diving through the hamburger menu. But that’s personal preference, neither here nor there.

I’m not really against the idea of menus per-se, but I am against demanding the small but dedicated Brave developer team upend their whole code base to appeal to users desiring a legacy design that all major browsers have abandoned. There isn’t a single one of the major browsers that have a file-menu turned on by default, and Firefox is the ONLY one that lets you turn it back on in the settings (and that particular setting is buried rather deeply in a hard-to-find place). That means that more than 70% or so of desktop browsers in the world don’t have a menu–and a good chunk of that roughly 30% is Safari, which is hard to count because of the way macOS has a file menu for everything build right into the OS. (If you like having menus for everything, macOS is the way to go!)

The biggest reason I think the pushback is warranted here within the community is that Brave is built in Chromium, which is the open source version of Chrome. Chrome doesn’t have a menu bar either; it hasn’t for years. It’s not just an issue of “turning the menu back on” because it doesn’t exist in Chromium. The dev team is working their tails off and pouring their heart & souls into the project, doing the best they can to push Brave to version 1.0, but folks in this thread would rather be angry because Brave, just like the most popular browser in the world that it’s built in, doesn’t have a file menu.

I don’t think that’s a fair ask, especially considering that if you REALLY want a menu that badly in Brave, there are extensions for that:

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The bookmarks bar only shows a handful, and you know that. It’s a world away from a proper menu. I also mentioned I’d have no problem with it being off by default. Many apps have it that way to save space (again, necessary for mobiles), while giving users the CHOICE whether to enable it.

We can agree to disagree on priorities, but the argument “it’s ok because that’s what everyone else is doing” is false, that’s what breeds this stupid “everything must be the same” mentality. Ever thought that people are wanting to switch browsers BECAUSE of what everything else is doing? Why would I just want thousands of different brands of the same thing, instead of different flavours?

With a brand new browser like Brave, why be like them? I understand that yes it’s built on Chromium, and would take some development effort to implement, but so did the menu bars on all the original browsers and every other interface going since forever, till mobile / tablet devices came along, and that became the stupid standard for desktops too. It was totally possible and easy enough that it was in EVERY APPLICATION. It’s not like one browser just copy / pasted it from another, they had to build it in, from scratch!

Sure priorities may be different, but with a new browser like Brave, why ignore something that would onboard many potential users? Surely that’s a huge part of this project, disrupting the existing browser sphere, and appealing to new users who are looking for an alternative, like me.

Why would I switch to using Brave as my primary browser, when it would introduce a negative experience and lack of functionality? I won’t. Make that tweak and give me the option, and I’d be straight there. I’m not alone on this, as you can see in this very thread.

Such a menu bar is such a simple and core part of interface functionality, but has been neglected as of late purely due to “tech evangelists” and blogger mentality of doing whatever the latest “trendy” thing is doing, and thinking only of mobile / tablet apps, and how the DEV wants you to use them. Much interface design nowdays is practically done for how the dev / designer wants it to be, rather than the user.

Thanks for the link to the extension, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work very well. It has copy / paste (but as you said we have shortcuts for that), but bookmarks and the other menus are either empty or do nothing. I’ve seen a few of these chrome extensions, and they seem to be mainly focused around when you’ve got a Google account synched. Unfortunately I’m yet to find one that works properly and as a traditional, built-in menu bar would.

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Huh? I have access to all of my bookmarks from the bookmarks bar…

screenshot
The abilty to nest folders means you can create as deep or shallow a menu as you want, exactly how you want it. You can’t perform application functions (open, save, etc.) that’s true, but as far as navigating bookmarks goes, you can make as detailed a menu as you want. :grinning:

As far as the extension goes, sorry it didn’t fit the bill. My understanding was that you could completely customize the menu to do whatever you want. But I can’t really speak to that personally; a friend of mine uses it…

Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on the rest.

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@AfricaGroundhog

No. I don’t either. I could rail against :

  • our local post office losing its quaint building and being forced to move into the supermarket;
  • the thousands of trees being chopped down to make way for 5G
    but,
    these deeply upsetting things that I can’t get over are just going to be
    and, in the light of them, it seemed little hassle, but rather, flexibility accomplishment, to forfeit a menu bar I was used to in favour of the stipulation of a ‘hamburger’ menu in a browser and to discover, incrementally, how to work with it. I got over my minor inconvenience and now it’s no problem.

Me too. Of course different people have different preferences. That doesn’t baffle me. That’s ‘of course’. What baffles me is how easily different people get so textually ‘hot’.

I’m quite :unamused: at the tone of some of the posts, with vocabulary which suggests inappropriate and unnecessary aggression, hostility and argumentativeness. For instance, I don’t think reference to ‘swearing’ is usually acceptable to the discourse terms -?

Cason, I found your posts to be helpful, educational, factual and to the point of discourse about the way the digital world IS going, like it or not.

and it is creepy, but what can we do except try and hold back the tide for ourselves where we can and simultaneously have to go with the flow somewhat?
No ‘glass house’ around me, I only have now what some would call a ‘dumb phone’. And I also HAVE TO walk through a town where tourists are not on the streets of their destination, but rather visiting the internet instead, so much so that they walk into you, quite missing that they are in a virtual itinerary, so why did they bother to pay the travel costs in the first place?

Professional Sound equipment wasn’t as fortunate then. To be abreast, one had to migrate to a digital, clickable interface. In order to retain the satisfying activity of manually moving sliders and knobs with physically responsive intuition, one has to stay seriously retro - like procuring equipment from other people’s throw-aways at the local dump.

Mouse-use has always left me feeling like I’m some kind of ‘coerced retard’ - it disturbs me. I learned computers with shortcut keys, then the mouse came and I abandoned short-cut keys, why? I wish I hadn’t. Now I’m still just an awkward

:rofl:

@iwantotobelieve, Hi.
What is an:

I thought an ‘hipster’ was some kind of Hippie who was Hip in the 70’s ?

As I analyse the thread, @BobT36 ,I don’t see that @AfricaGroundhog IS, in fact, arguing.

In the first instance, @AfricaGroundhog, I don’t interpret that you were in any disagreement at all. I interpret that you were simply in a discourse, very cogently.

:grinning:
:leaves:

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I’ll just quip here with a couple of links:

https://www.google.com/search?q=arri+camera&newwindow=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiR2J2wuoDjAhWhxIsKHeY2D1IQ_AUIECgB&biw=1536&bih=662#imgrc=kA0F9Qz5sokqiM:

https://www.google.com/search?q=davinci+console&newwindow=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi4_-LSuoDjAhVyk4sKHTcPDIwQ_AUIECgB&biw=1536&bih=662

Yeah, “retro throwaways” lol
https://www.studiocare.com/blackmagic-design-dv-res-aadpnl-davinci-resolve-advanced-panel-includes-resolve-12-software.html
Please if you have something like this to “throw away” at me, I’d gladly pay the shipping costs.

This idea of touch-less future from hollywood films like minority report has already been thoroughly discredited and abandoned. Especially in professional circles. I’we worked on a software project with a world renowned UX designer who made his reputation with “minimalist” design back in the day and he told me that “hamburger menus and “clean design” are dead” and that was two years ago… and the really funny thing was that it was a mobile project, not a desktop one.

Also, no, I do not want to wave my hands around like a maniac on meth just to copy some files or switch tabs. It looks good on film but as user experience its crap. Also, it is much more demanding on the brain to have to maintain constant hand-eye coordination which is required from touchscreens that do not give you tactile feedback. That’s why my wife, who is also in a profession which is VERY tech dependent never switched over to smartphones.
I am a professional filmmaker. And while touchscreens can be quite useful for some particular use cases (like touch focus/exposure etc) for the majority of functions they are seen as cheap and impractical ersatz replacements - bandaids. The same goes for hamburger menus. As with cameras - you have touch screen functions because your camera is too small/cheap to afford proper knobs and dials - so it is with software - you use hamburger menu because your screen is too small to fit in a proper menu or, better yet, an array of buttons/dials/sliders.

Placing a hamburger menu as the only option for a desktop browser is akin to removing all buttons and switches from an Alexa or an ENG camera because its “a trendy thing to do”. If some of these camera manufacturers did this, the professional set would abandon them in a millisecond, and with disgust. In professional world trendy posturing is not appreciated, not in the least. And what is true in professional world eventually trickles down to consumer one.

And finally. Your android phone is an almost perfect portable gaming machine. So why Switch? Ponder on this for a while. Also why are so many people so reluctant to abandon windows 7 that microsoft has to blackmail them into compliance? I’m a techie to the core and they’ll have to pry windows 7 from my cold dead hands before I replace it with some crappy metro b…it.

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…and you DON’T believe in keyboard shortcuts? :thinking:

I’ve never met anyone who was competent in Final Cut and/or Premiere that wasn’t a keyboard-shortcut wizard. It would take eons to do everything via mousing through menus in an editing suite, even without a “hamburger” menu. (Or when using Audition-esque audio editors for that matter.)

For the record, I think you’re right about audio engineering stuff though; all my audio buddies prefer the physical mixing boards. I don’t blame them. But when they’re doing digital, they’re also all about keyboard shortcuts and not the mousing around in menus, so… :man_shrugging:

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I’m baffled that you can’t accept some people don’t wanna use a keyboard, I use ONLY the mouse for everything you’re talking about and it’s perfectly fine for me, just like the keyboard’s perfectly fine for you, that’s settled now how about this thread stays on topic? I’m trying to figure out if I’m quitting this browser or not, not get sold on keyboards, I’ve known about keyboards for quite a while believe it or not, in fact I’m willing to bet every person who replied to this thread knows about keyboards

side note: I use a ps4 controller for every game on pc no matter the genre and if there’s no controller support I don’t play the game - I come in 1st place whenever I feel like it with no effort, while listening to people like you rant and rave about keyboards, so annoying lol

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As per Groundhog’s advice, I’ve now started putting ALL my bookmarks into a single folder.

Enabling the Bookmarks bar then lets me essentially access them from a single one-click menu, from the left hand side, rather than arsing around with the multi-click burger menu on the right.
Bookmarks

This isn’t ideal, of course, as it means taking up a whole toolbar’s worth of space just for a single menu, when a proper Menu Bar would give many different menus and items of functionality. It’s better than nothing though at least. At least now I can access my Bookmarks quickly.

GIVE US A PROPER MENU BAR PLEASE, FFS. I WANT TO USE BRAVE FULL-TIME.

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