Comment 51 for bug 682788

The mockups by farran in comment #38 is EXCELLENT.
IMHO it solves all problems with a traditional menu taking up too much space in the main window chrome, while being fairly accesible without first focusing the window you wan't to access the menu from, like the appmenu-indicator forces you to do currently. Window title is still draggable. And, to be perfectly honest, a window so small you can't see the whole menu is a corner case IMHO, and even then you can expand the full menu by hovering it or so, like in the mockups.
From what i understand, we still need client-side window borders for this to happen though (correct me if i'm wrong).

If implemented, the top panel becomes mostly empty space though, so in that respect, we then have another mostly unused area of our screens that could be put to better use. Of course, you could always use a "wing panel" of sorts, and allow full screen windows to occupy roughly ~ 40-60 pixels more than before (menubar and top panel). Perhaps it would even be an idea to move the indicator system to the sidebar, and have that as the sole panel/bar on the desktop window. Maybe i'm pushing it too far? :)
By now, i've probably strayed quite far from the scope of this bug report, but it makes sense to draw people a picture of a possible outcome of the rationale to redesign the menu system, don't you think?