I’m not really even sure what average user would even care about hiding the menu unless they were browsing using a mobile device with a tiny screen.

I remember back in the Win95 days and earlier apps usually did not even have tool bars, only menu bars. Tool bars were a luxury. At best they displayed 16×16 pixel icons and yet sometimes tool bars were criticized for wasting screen space. Then Netscape and IE came along started using huge buttons on their tool bars. The Windows 95 desktop Windows Explorer didn’t even show a tool bar by default and suddenly the IE 4/98 Windows Explorer had HUGE tool bar buttons – and that was back when people were regularly running 640*480 and 800*600!!

You know Windows Vista/IE 7 was all about blatantly copying the look of MacOS X (Areo, Exposé, Dashboard, etc) and as such they tried to make IE 7 look like Safari. But since Windows doesn’t have a shared menu bar they just hid it instead. Now everybody is trying to copy them just because “Microsoft did it”.

Permitting the user to customize this is great, but I should point out this implementation is flawed. Once hidden there is no visual indication that the user can restore the menu. Right-clicking or using Alt keys is not considered “discoverable”. For comparison, on Mozilla Sea Monkey the menus and tool bars can “collapsed” leaving a visible indicator behind that they can be restored. Although in practice the menu bar should never be hidden (or movable: MS Office 97 let users drag the menu all over the place causing all kinds of confusion and it was too easy to move by accident) because the standard way to hide/display other UI elements is through the “view” menu.

I use the menu bar quite often so I’m glad that it will be easy to enable viewing it when it’s hidden by default in future releases.