this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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It's been a while since I used a mac but doesn't it literally say 'Finder' at the top of the screen when you open that?
You think all long time apple users know that the application name is up there, or that there is even a menu for the app at the top of the screen? No, sometimes telling people to click on the apple in the top left, so that they can go to restart, blows people's minds.
I honestly still find it such a weird UX decision to decouple the menu from the application window. Especially when you have multiple windows open on a large screen, the menu is on the opposite corner of the screen. Makes no sense
it's a really interesting decision because while it makes the menu positioning consistent, it also creates a hard link between the active window and the desktop, which means that things like "hover to focus" and "click button in background window" fundamentally cannot work.
Huh? Both hover to focus and click button in background work in macOS, though hover to focus usually requires an external application. There used to be a focus follows mouse that you could enable via a terminal command, but Apple removed it.
The top menu bar kind of seems to be more of a result of historical happenstance, and maybe some different philosophies regarding Fitts law.
Bill Atkinson, who designed the UX for the Apple Lisa recounts that part of the decision was to avoid the problem of menu items being possibly obscured. If the window of some application is near the bottom or partially off the desktop, the menu bar of individual windows can become obscured and inaccessible.
Historically the menu bar would've been easier for normal people to learn due to consistency, and also helped with limited screen estate.
Memories of Lisa - CHM - https://computerhistory.org/blog/memories-of-lisa/
it's been a few years since my last mac but i remember that clicking on things in background windows would bring them forward rather than trigger the action, so you needed a second click to actually do the thing. i did enable focus on hover and it wreaked havoc on the window management so i had to turn it off. can't remember the details though.
It sure does.
yes