@BobT36 everyone has different opinions on what should work and how things should be. Nobody has the time or resources to appeal to everyone. So what often is done is research given to what the majority of users want and then they build around that.
Overall a menu bar, especially one appearing on the left, is not desired by the average user. If nothing else, many are pushing to even want to remove more parts. There’s the link Mythical made in the last reply, but then also things like How to hide the address bar or Request: hide title bar on scroll up, or even How to reduce the height of the browser bars (tabs, address, and bookmarks)
What’s interesting is I beg to differ on both points. You can still use just a keyboard to navigate if you want. But more interestingly enough, there tends to be little to no reason for a mouse to ever be on the left side.
The scroll bar to go up or down on a website is on the right. Then you have VPN, Cast, Wallet, Profile, Extension, etc buttons on the right. Average person is right handed, with about 90% of the population being as such.
And overall, there’s little that is ever having to be used from the hamburger menu. What is it you’re needing to go the extra steps of opening menus to do?
I’d say it’s almost reversed. People ate turds out of necessity in the past and now they found better ways to do things. But you learned to love turds and now are complaining that they took them away. Why must you eat these nice juicy hamburgers when you could be having a fat turd instead?
Also keep in mind Brave is open source. If you think it’s so easy or there, nothing is stopping you from enabling it. You could even fork something. Truth of the matter is it isn’t that easy and people don’t want it. If enough wanted it, more browsers would be doing it.
And the idea you aren’t and can’t do it yourself, or even create an extension to do it, shows that it’s nowhere near as easy or convenient as you claim.
- Supporting two UI options means developers must write and maintain code for both the menu bar and hamburger menu. Any updates to functionality must be implemented in both systems, potentially doubling the workload for UI-related features.
- The menu bar and hamburger menu have different layouts and interactions, so they require separate design considerations, especially when testing across different screen sizes or platforms.
- Adding a toggle introduces more complexity to testing. Developers need to ensure both interfaces work seamlessly with the browser’s features and extensions. Testing accessibility for both modes adds to the time investment.
- While the performance impact would likely be minimal, loading and rendering two different UI options might marginally increase resource usage, particularly in memory-constrained environments.
For a small team like Brave, this amount of time, money, and effort isn’t worth it. You would have a higher chance by getting changes in Chromium, but even they don’t want to spend the resources on it in general.