Why not a Menu Bar?

Brave Feature Requests Desktop Requests
43

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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44

[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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45

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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46

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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47

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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48

@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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49

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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50

…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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51

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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52

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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53

I think the best inspiration can be Opera, Opera has a pretty looking menu bar in my opinion.

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54

I am leaving Brave as it missing a menu bar. I just need that back. Period.

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55

Need a fullscreen button somewhere near the home button at the top left.

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56

Call me a curmudgeon. Call me whatever you like. I’ve been using PCs since the Tandy TRS-80 MarkII. I’ve seen every iteration of Windows, and also something called O/S2, Mac-crap, and many flavors of Linux going back to the mid nineties when I had to compile my own drivers for some devices because the available drivers were very limited.

Here’s what I hate: Fads like the current lack of menus. I like menus. I like the constant of File Edit View etc… across the top of my applications. It gives a kind of simple continuity across all the things I’ve done across the many years since Windows became the standard business computing environment. There’s no need to tamper with something that works, just so you can say “Hey, we changed this, isn’t it cool?” Not all change is good, and the worst change of all is change for change’s sake.

I realize there’s some johnny-come-lately genius who thinks this is GREAT! Well, here’s the deal: You’re basically making sure this browser isn’t more widely adopted. How cool is THAT?

Bring back the menus. I find that Brave is a pretty good browser, and I like it, but the lack of a menu says “We’re not a serious player in this field. We just dabble. We like fads.”

There’s nothing Brave about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

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57

…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.)

Well, lets see. I’m on the new brave, and when I want to quit, lets run through the standard shortcuts Windows users have been using since the DOS days. Alt-F-X? Nope. The previous quit command Ctrl-Q from Muon Brave? Nope. What about the global windows quit, Alt-F4? Huh, that only closes one of my 6 Brave windows AND makes it not reopen when I restart the program.

This is just a single command from a single menu, that has failed for 3 common keyboard shortcuts that have been in use for a significant period of time (DOS was around since what, 1980s? So 3+ decades). What about the dozens of other commands, do they have any consistency across Brave versions? Let alone between Brave and various other companies’ applications? Are you telling me to memorize what could be over 100 shortcuts across each of the dozens of programs I use that may all be different?

To examine your argument further that keyboard shortcuts are faster and thus should be used, lets apply that exact logic to just the hamburger menu vs the menubar which are both ‘menus’ for people preferring mouse-based interaction. The menubar is larger with larger buttons and less sub-menus than a hamburger menu, which means by Fitt’s Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts’s_law) it is faster to navigate through.

Now, lets go a step further. Mobile design eschews keyboard shortcuts. What if your desktop application suddenly didn’t have any keyboard shortcuts, because the developers decided that touch screens are the way to go (“every device today has a touch screen!”). First Google or Apple makes their software touch-centric for their new touch-enabled laptops. Then everyone follows them. What would you do? Would you happily abandon your keyboard shortcuts to reach over it and poke at your computer monitor? Use a mouse to simulate touching, and not be able to easily do two- or three-finger touches?

That’s the only point I am trying to make - losing the menubar cuts out one of the ways to use the software that some people favor, and a way that has been common to all programs for decades. Having the option to enable it allows for a comfortable experience among a wider audience.

Vivaldi is Chromium based, with a menubar. You yourself linked an extension that is a menubar. So if individual developers or small groups can do it, certainly the Brave team can too.

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58

I use FVD Speed dial to password protect all my porn bookmarks ; )

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59

It’s time to provide OPTIONAL MODES !!!

Simple + Advanced + Expert

You don’t have to be a simpleton with a phone to want a Simple Mode and the so-called “experts” aren’t insisting they have all the answers - but there is enough here for anyone to find their niche.

I leave it up to the people to democratically decide what they qualify as Simple, Advanced, and Expert modes, but I’m betting a Menu Bar might go in the Advanced and Expert modes.

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60

Or just a simple “View Menu Bar” option, (Default to off if they want that for some reason). It’s not exactly the most complex requirement is it…

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61

I just downloaded this browser and installed it , now trying to get “file edit view tools help” bar and I can’t, I have tried now for 20 minutes and there are suggestions on line but then I find that it seems to be impossible. I am uninstalling this shitty browser now. I am sure there are others that have this menu at the top. I only have to click twice to get anything done with view , or edit etc. Now this stupid yellow round icon on the far right and the screen makes me have to twist my neck to look at the options, then you have to click multiple times to get any function to happen. Why not have this pop up in the center of the screen at least ?? in plain view , in front of you. I hate this and will uninstall now after I finish posting this comment. What idiot decided to remove the "file edit view… this is in every Windows window. What garbage. Most everyone only uses a few of the functions , not the hundred things in the hamburger icon. this is totally disgusting . I also like the bookmarks or favorites at the top of the screen next to view. I have it in firefox, but firefox is also garbage, it takes so long to start up and then has no java, so I can’t do banking deposits, I have to open IE. To get to a bookmark in this browner, I have to click on the yellow circle , then hover over bookmarks to get access. In firefox, I just click on bookmarks directly and get access. So this browser makes it twice as hard to get to a webpage as Firefox. Why ??? Chome does the same thing and I don’t think they listen to feedback. Just like when Windows 8 came out and Microsoft told us “we don’t need a start button” that is old fashioned ??? Then so many people complained that they caved in. They lied , telling us everyone preferred “no start button” I used to put in a classic shell to revert back. this little yellow circle is a horrible idea and should be changed or at least give you the option of putting the nice and neat menu bar at the top of the screen to make for an easier browsing experience.

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62

I forgot, goodbye Brave browser, when you put the menu bar back , I will take another look at you. Now to uninstall and give a review of your browser on other websites.

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