Canonical has come up with a replacement for the global menu bar, one of the most notable features of Ubuntu's Unity desktop and also one of its most problematic.

The global menu bar places application menus at the top of a user's screen rather than within the application itself.

"Despite displaying the menu contents outside of the window, the menus are still window-specific," we noted in a review of Ubuntu 12.04 in May 2012. "By design, the global menu bar displays the menu of the focused window. This proves awkward in some applications with dialogs and multiple windows."

The intent of moving application-specific menus into the global menu bar was to leave more room for content in applications. But even for people who liked the design, it has grown more problematic over time with the proliferation of bigger monitors, according to Canonical employee Marco Trevisan. The Ubuntu desktop team is bringing the application windows back into the application windows themselves for the 14.04 release in April this year, Trevisan wrote today.

Ubuntu developers wanted to "propose a solution to fix the main UX bug we have [had] in Unity since its very first release: the menus being hard to find or too far from their parent window," Trevisan wrote. "In fact, having the application menus in the top panel really worked very well in small screens but now, especially with HiDPI monitors getting more and more popular, the top panel could be really too far from the actual window location."

The fix, which Trevisan credited to desktop user experience lead John Lea, is a new locally integrated menu for applications, similar to the design of pre-Unity versions of Ubuntu.

In a video, Canonical Engineering Manager Stephen Webb said, "We're putting the menus back where the windows are by adding them to the window title bar. You still have the increased content area but you have less work for your trackpad finger. As always, when you're not using them, the menus hide to reduce the visual clutter in your work area."

The first prototype of local application menus for Unity landed a couple of years ago, but it didn't work well, Trevisan wrote. "The amount of technical work needed [to implement this is] not to be underestimated," he wrote. "Being more precise, one of the blockers we had in 12.04 was our dependency on the legacy compiz decor plugin + gtk-window-decorator, that has worked 'OK' in the last years but—apart from using deprecated technologies (gtk2 in primis)—it really would have made this concept impossible to realize."

"So, the first step has been moving away from the old gtk2-based decorations and writing brand new decorations supporting Gtk3 CSS theming inside Unity itself; this has been a huge work (including writing a brand-new widget system for handling compiz textures in a more natural way), but it gave us great benefits in the end such as much faster windows resizing, [an] improved look, [and] support for dynamic scaling (for both HighDPI and accessibility reasons)."

Ubuntu 14.04 is a Long Term Support release, intended to be more stable than other versions, so the Ubuntu desktop team is seeking community feedback before turning the new menu mode on by default. Users with a pre-release version of 14.04 can turn the local menus on now. In the Ubuntu software updater settings, check the option for pre-released updates and download the latest updates. Then, in the Appearance panel, select the option to put application menus in the window title bars: