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4 months ago
2
This is why we can't have nice things.
Summer 2025
Hiding a Side Panel
It's that time of year again, when I sit down to whine about user interfaces. Recently, I had to read a PDF file in Google Chrome, which, to its credit, it could. The only little snag was the navigation side panel to the left, showing miniatures of each page: it took up space and was a bit distracting when scrolling, so I decided to close it. The question was how.
The side panel doesn't have a button for closing or collapsing it - not even a hidden one that shows up on hover. Such buttons were once common, but have been removed because, uh, the rising cost of dairy, or something. Likewise, Chrome doesn't have the once common "File, Edit, View" pulldown menu bar, where one could otherwise have assumed to find a "Show side panel" option in the "View" menu.
Instead, I first availed myself to what seems to be Google's hot new take on the hamburger menu icon: the skinny "meatball" icon.
Well, it was a menu alright, but there was no option for hiding the side panel. Bummer. But then I noticed that all the way on the left hand side of the UI there was another - actual - hamburger icon. Its short but promising tooltip was, simply, "Menu".
Surprisingly, clicking it didn't open a menu. Instead, it actually toggled the side panel. Mission accomplished! All thanks to the discoverability, coherency and sound logic of modern interface design.
Although the screenshots are from Chromium, the behavior is identical in Chrome - at least when I checked in a version from June 17, 2025. Ironically, on Chromium's standard toolbar, there's an icon I immediately identified as being for toggling a side panel - which also has the tooltip "Show side panel" and, when clicked, toggles a side panel (just not the one I wanted to hide). Go figure.
Don't Copy the Crappy
Is this nit-picking? I'm not so sure. Apart from an operating system, a web browser is probably the most common piece of software people run on their computers nowadays. Google Chrome still has the lion's share of the browser market, which means it's likely one of the most used applications in the world. (Even on my rather techno-contrarian corner of the web, it accounts for half of all traffic.)
UI design has always been a lot about copying, but it was once about copying - or perhaps rather perpetuating - established, coherent and recognizable patterns. At some point we decided to throw those demonstrably working patterns away and start over again, with the entire world as our unsuspecting lab rats. And since we've thrown out those time-tested and largely agreed upon patterns, designers and developers now resort to copying whatever haphazard behaviors and impromptu solutions they see in big name applications - because that's the closest thing to a conceptual standard we've got left.
Hence, when Google Chrome introduces some kind of UI concept, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before we start seeing seeing it elsewhere - though I pray we're spared any other applications where hamburger icons just mean... whatever. At the very least, they'll hopefully pick a better tooltip than "Menu".
Conceptual Anarchy
The hamburger menu was once popularized as a space saving concept on smartphones. It has since moved to the desktop, because, uh, import tariffs on glue? The meatballs are supposedly for saving horizontal space - also on a smartphone, one would have to assume. Except the one above runs on a desktop and saves no space, because it's got the same actual size as all the other buttons in the toolbar. In other applications, meatball menus are instead sometimes used as a complement to the hamburger menu - usually for more local, contextual action menus. Because maybe research? Or maybe unmatched socks. Or something. At any rate, what little conceptual coherency we had for these icons and menus is no longer valid.
So. Come on, guys. Really? For all the many stupid flaws of our current crappy UI paradigm, we managed to keep the hamburger menu as a fixed point - if not spatially, then at least conceptually. Now you've gone and ruined that, too. I give up. You win. Let's turn all icons into hamburger icons. Is it a menu? Is it a toggle? No, it's Discoverability Man!
Screw this. Time to go find a table to flip.
