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.

[–] Meron35@lemmy.world 2 points 51 minutes ago (1 children)

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/

[–] lime@feddit.nu 1 points 37 minutes ago

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.