Google has started testing out a “unified menu” for Chrome similar to the one already in use by the Opera Browser. This new feature is now available for the latest Chromium and Chrome Dev builds and can be activated by adding the following command tag line to the application’s short cut:

–new-wrench-menu

This new feature should work to make the Chrome browser a lot cleaner than it used to be. As seen in the latest build versions of Chromium OS, Google seems to be pushing for an even more minimalist Chrome Browser and Chrome OS user interface; I have to admit, it looks impressive.

An interesting quote dug out by Alex Chitu at his blog explains what purpose the menu bar should serve according to Mozilla:

The general purpose of the menubar is to contain all of the things that you want your program to do but you can’t cram into the main UI. So the menubar generally ends up with a lot of stuff that isn’t used very often, if at all, and yet is reproduced on every window and takes up a significant amount of real estate. It also has the tendency to become a dumping ground for new or hardly used features. Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar has been systematically removed from Windows applications built by Microsoft and other vendors. It has been replaced with alternatives like the Windows Explorer contextual strip or the Ribbon found in Office 2007