Definitely check out the #CSD hashtag for my prior rants on the topic, lol, but basically, it's an attempt to innovate on the bog standard window title bar by making it a little bit bigger and placing buttons, tabs, and other interactive elements on it. Firefox and now Thunderbird both do this by default. Also Chromium, but #WeDoNotSpeakOfTheEvilHere.
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The way the mozilla apps do it is pretty decent, because it does its best to respect your system's colors/theming, and doesn't look too far off from other standard apps.
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The ones that really annoy me are all of the Gnome apps, which use the CSD as a way to push their visual design language all the way up into the titlebar. They're not terribly designed, but they make ZERO attempt to respect your system's theming. Gnome apps do their best to look like gnome apps, because why aren't you running gnome, peasant!?!?
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My main criticism of CSDs is that UI elements are used with muscle memory, and being able to throw your pointer to the top of the window and grab it without worrying about selecting a tab or a menu object is important. The more you take non-conscious actions and force them to become more conscience actions, you introduce delay and fatigue into the UI.
@RL_Dane @CleoQc @thunderbird The irony of CSD is that vertical space is only more valuable because 16:9 became standard due to TV manufacturers not wanting to have 2 sizes for manufacturing to cut costs.
When 1:1 3:2 5:4 or 16:10 was a thing having a space for a title bar wasn't a problem that needed solving.
I put up with CSD and understand it has optimal use cases such as on #linuxphone but to me 16:9 is the real problem.
Even from past use-cases such as dual or 3 monitor setups 16:9 isn't nearly as optimal as 16:10 or even 5:4 was.
@lorendias @CleoQc @thunderbird
Honestly, CSDs waste more space than they promise to free up. Particularly, GNOME CSDs are chonkin' FAT.
I agree about 16:9. I'm not sure if it was screen manufacturers or just computer makers wanting to avoid user complaints about letterboxes on videos.
I think 4:3 or even portrait displays were perfect. XD