global menu bar no longer supported after 20.04 upgrade

[vexorian]

1) version: 79.0+build1-0ubuntu0.20.04.1 500
2) Ubuntu Release : Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS

3) What I expected to happen:

In Unity DE. menu bars are integrated with title bar or top panel when maximized

4) What happened instead:

Menu bar doesn't integrate. Takes too much vertical space. Problematic because I have made a jump to wide screens around 2012. I guess decision makers at ubuntu still enjoy 4:3 screens and thus don't see the value in DEs that optimize vertical space. But it would be really nice to have a hand here.

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The current workaround is to disable the menu bar, which leaves me at the mercy of the hamburger menu. The hamburger menu is an implant from old Mobile App Design. But nowadays even Mobile App UX designers decry the Hamburger menu and in a desktop it makes little sense. Firefox is a good example because the menu bar has sections like History which are a lot richer than what's available to be accessed from the hamburger menu. It's really just not possible to have as many menu options and categories as a menu bar in a hamburger menu. And access is less efficient -> more mouse movement -> more mouse clicks.

So I have to choose between wasting space unnecessarily with a menu bar that does not integrate with the top panel OR losing a lot of access to options and settings by removing the menu bar and using the hamburger menu instead.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

While we appreciate this is effectively a functional regression, it is intended. Exposing firefox's menus to the global menu bar involved a non-trivial distro patch that was increasingly difficult to maintain (because it relied on many internal APIs), so it was dropped before 20.04 (see https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mozillateam/firefox/firefox.focal/revision/1340).

The firefox updates in 16.04 and 18.04 still carry the patch, FWIW.

[vexorian (vexorian)]

I don't understand, it's not like Unity was the only DE environment with a global menu bar. This looks like another case of Gnome dragging everyone else's UX down with them.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Although the absence of a global menubar in GNOME by default did influence this particular decision, the main factor was the increasing difficulty to maintain the firefox patch that enabled the feature. The patch was quite large (several thousands LOC) and heavily relied on internal APIs that have been changing significantly in the past few releases.

I appreciate this is a functional regression for users of Unity and other desktop environments with a global menu bar, but this is a trade-off that had to be made to ensure timely updates for future firefox releases.

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1890049