Comment 63 for bug 682788

Rawphi: liked the demo for your patch (not downloading it myself just yet because I'm trying to fix a host of other problems related to the upgrade, but I appreciate the work).

The irony here is that everyone is talking about fitts' law when advocating for global menus, but there's a problem: Fitts' Law doesn't apply to Unity's global menus. Go to the extreme upper-left corner of your screen--the part Fitts says is many times easier to find than a nearby window target--and click. *Nothing happens*! The Close Window button is right next to your mouse on maximized windows, but even then it's not in the actual corner, so nothing is activated by that click anyway. This is in direct contrast to, say, Apple's OSX, where the apple menu is actually located in that corner, and actually does something when you click in that corner. Since you're not locating the menu in the corner, but rather at the screen edge, you don't degenerate into Fitts' Law with the target of infinite size. The target is not infinitely wide in the horizontal direction, so you have to do more complicated math to determine the actual speed to get to the target.

So, even if global menus were a good idea for non-maximized windows--and I agree that they are--the way they are currently implemented still doesn't help that much. Even further, we really need something in the actual corner for Fitts' Law to really apply, and really there ought to be something there that isn't a Close button, maybe a task/workspace switcher?

Another significant point: when looking to apply Fitts' Law, you can't just look at the mouse pointer; you also have to look at physical eye movement. Here is where the case for large monitors needing local menus for non-maximized windows really comes into focus, because for the eye, a screen edge/corner is *not* infinite width! "Pointing" at that global menu with your eyes across a large monitor's screen may take 2-2.5 times as long or longer. Now, this wasn't really such a big deal back in the days of 15-inch monitors, but these days 23-24-inch monitors are fairly common, and multiple monitor setups will only become more common as even integrated graphics become capable of driving multiple displays well.