Many of your arguments doesn't make much sense to me:
They're also nearly always at the top of the page. That was fine when phones where smaller, but with the current trend of tall and big phones (not to mention smaller tablets) it takes me having to reorient my hand to get to it.
What's the difference when you'll have a horizontal scrolling menu? It will be still on the top of the page. I think the only solution for this case is a drawer coming from a left/right swipe from the edge of the screen.
why hide such an import piece of your website behind a mandatory interaction
It's just a click/tap. I don't think it influences user experience that much.
Why not use a horizontal scrolling menu?
Because IMO this won't be obvious for most of the users.
Because it's recognisable
That's the point. From the business/user perspective, It's a lot better choice to use a solution that everybody knows and understands, instead of reinventing the wheel and hoping for the best, that anyone will understand.
To sum up, I don't think this is a bad solution. Never had an issue with it. It's just a click/tap to open up the menu on mobile, and on desktop it's mostly not an issue. I'd rather see a hamburger on the top on my phone screen and see more of the content of the page, rather than a horizontal menu which most likely would need to take some height because it wouldn't make sense placing it next to the logo/branding.
I get where you're coming from here, and how I might look like I'm nitpicking. I am!
The thing with menu's at the top also goes for 'regular' menus; I wasn't very clear on that, my apologies. Definitely agree that a swipe from a side would be nice, but it would break convention so much that people will never figure it out. It's also used for forward/backwards navigation in most mobile browsers, so that's another hurdle.
A click/tap can really be a nuisance for a website. It depends on the implementation, of course. But I'd mostly just want to scroll down at my own leisure when I visit a page, or see content that I would click. Maybe I tap the menu button and it doesn't even give me the page I'm looking for. Maybe there's a scroll within the hamburger menu.
I know it seems nitpicky, but with nearly every site using it, it's more widespread then you might think.
This also goes into why it sucks that it's recognisable. A hamburger menu is now the default go-to option. Even if there would be a obvious better option, you won't get to implement it.
I agree that it sucks that there's not much interest in how to improve it because everybody just agreed that the hamburger is the standard and it's a waste of time trying to improve it / propose a better solution. But I guess when it comes to innovation - it's always a problem, as people need to learn it and get used to it, which takes a lot of time.
I also agree that a single click can be a nuisance and it would be great to have a solution that could allow us to get rid of it, but there are also many solutions a lot worse than the hamburger. I just found this argument to be too nitpicky 😄
If someone will propose a better alternative which would be intuitive for users and would require less interaction than the hamburger - then I'm all in of course 😃
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Many of your arguments doesn't make much sense to me:
What's the difference when you'll have a horizontal scrolling menu? It will be still on the top of the page. I think the only solution for this case is a drawer coming from a left/right swipe from the edge of the screen.
It's just a click/tap. I don't think it influences user experience that much.
Because IMO this won't be obvious for most of the users.
That's the point. From the business/user perspective, It's a lot better choice to use a solution that everybody knows and understands, instead of reinventing the wheel and hoping for the best, that anyone will understand.
To sum up, I don't think this is a bad solution. Never had an issue with it. It's just a click/tap to open up the menu on mobile, and on desktop it's mostly not an issue. I'd rather see a hamburger on the top on my phone screen and see more of the content of the page, rather than a horizontal menu which most likely would need to take some height because it wouldn't make sense placing it next to the logo/branding.
I get where you're coming from here, and how I might look like I'm nitpicking. I am!
The thing with menu's at the top also goes for 'regular' menus; I wasn't very clear on that, my apologies. Definitely agree that a swipe from a side would be nice, but it would break convention so much that people will never figure it out. It's also used for forward/backwards navigation in most mobile browsers, so that's another hurdle.
A click/tap can really be a nuisance for a website. It depends on the implementation, of course. But I'd mostly just want to scroll down at my own leisure when I visit a page, or see content that I would click. Maybe I tap the menu button and it doesn't even give me the page I'm looking for. Maybe there's a scroll within the hamburger menu.
I know it seems nitpicky, but with nearly every site using it, it's more widespread then you might think.
This also goes into why it sucks that it's recognisable. A hamburger menu is now the default go-to option. Even if there would be a obvious better option, you won't get to implement it.
I agree that it sucks that there's not much interest in how to improve it because everybody just agreed that the hamburger is the standard and it's a waste of time trying to improve it / propose a better solution. But I guess when it comes to innovation - it's always a problem, as people need to learn it and get used to it, which takes a lot of time.
I also agree that a single click can be a nuisance and it would be great to have a solution that could allow us to get rid of it, but there are also many solutions a lot worse than the hamburger. I just found this argument to be too nitpicky 😄
If someone will propose a better alternative which would be intuitive for users and would require less interaction than the hamburger - then I'm all in of course 😃