Almost every desktop application has a File menu whether or not it deals with files. The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File? OBS has "Always on Top" as an option within "File".
Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think we should be banishing menus. The hamburger icon is just an iconic, space efficient way to say "menu"
There are guidelines for what should be in menu bars, what order the items should be in, and how they should behave for different sorts of application.
> "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help?
On Mac, it should be in the "App" menu and called "Preferences...", it should be the first item in the menu, except if you have an "About YourAppName" item which always goes at the top with a seperator underneath.
On Windows, it should be in the "Tools" menu, and called "Options...". 4 On Linux, it should be under the "Edit" menu, and called "Preferences".
If it's not, then the app (in my opinion) is broken. Of course, many apps are lazily ported across platforms or "hamburgerized". The Windows situation is obviously also more messy because of the newer "ribbon" standards complicating things a bit, but there are right answers.
Of course there are ancient, rarely updated guidelines that almost all applications ignore. Microsoft indeed has that great guide, and yet their own applications implement it inconsistently, and often incorrectly according to the guidelines. Apple is a tad bit better, but third party apps rarely get it right. The best thing Apple has going for it is specifically on the question of where Settings is: there is a dedicated app menu, so it just makes logical sense to put Settings there. Or was it Preferences? Options.
> On Linux, it should be under the "Edit" menu, and called "Preferences".
This one is a stretch, there are no such consistent and agreed-upon guidelines.
My point here is that just because things can be abused (or even, in the case of desktop applications, are almost _always_ abused), doesn't mean the general concept is useless or should be removed from applications. I would recommend instead of trying to cram a hundred possible actions into a tiny icon bar at the bottom of your iPhone, or removing 97 of those actions from the app itself and leaving just the most basic three down there, to maybe consider building a sensible and well-arranged menu layout _if and when_ you need more than those three that you can fit at the bottom.
> Of course there are ancient, rarely updated guidelines
You mean well researched guidelines with tons of evidence behind their decisions [1] that are as relevant today as they were 20 years ago.
> almost all applications ignore.
That most current applications ignore because people think they are ancient rarely updated guidelines.
This is especially evident in the MacOS world. HIG were the guide on the platform, and developers tried to adhere to them. And then the new breed of "designers" took over and even Apple breaks nearly every single one of them [2]
Microsoft has always been worse when it came to enforcing consistency of user interfaces, but even their choices were never random until quite recently [3].
Wait, there's a standard for ribbon menus??? I thought that was just a horrible failed experiment that drove a huge number of people away from the MS suite towards Google Docs and was abandoned...
This is a problem of poor app design, not the stunning indictment of traditional menus that you seem to think it is.
A poor menu layout can be fixed. A hamburger menu will always be a byzantine mix of everything because everything has to be in there. There is no organization, except flyout menus--which were a problem with traditional menu designs, but you could organize without them.
Hell, some applications have just moved the traditional menu behind the hamburger. Why? Because that was a good way to organize operations, even if it wasn't perfect, or wasn't always perfectly implemented.
On macOS, both the Quit and Preferences items are consistently in the application menu (the menu left of "File" that has the name of the application). And the shortcuts are consistently Cmd + q and Cmd + ,
Well, unless it's an Electron app. Which is another good reason to avoid them altogether.
> The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File?
Does it ? This is the issue when people see no more as their own OS.
In the past, just like today, there were multiple modes to exit a program. One of them is to press Exit and the programm will exit cleanly. The other is to press the X in the window corner in Windows ( or send a close message from a window manager) which, depending on the implementation, might lose data. There is also the option to kill the process. Now in my opinion this Exit is a good thing and it is clear what is doing.
> The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File?
Happy to know I am not the only one who considers this weird.
It would probably make more sense to have an "Application" menu before "File". It could contain things like "About", "Help", "Setting" and "Exit". (Especially in cases where the current "Help" menu only contains "Show help" and "About". If it has more than five items, then I'd say it deserves a separate menu.)
Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think we should be banishing menus. The hamburger icon is just an iconic, space efficient way to say "menu"