User Experience Notes

Google’s Chrome browser recently introduced graphical buttons within a control dropdown, not something you see very often. The convention is that a dropdown disappears once you click on an item, so this breaks consistency, as when changing zoom the dropdown remains. Nonetheless it’s a good choice for zoom, as you really want to play with the level until it feels right, and it’d be annoying to have to re-open the dropdown for each adjustment (which is in fact how it happens in many programs and kind of sucks.)

Graphical buttons for cut/copy/paste are a different story - they don’t provide much improvement over 3 separate line items other than saving space. Nonetheless since they are arguably the most widely known computer keyboard shortcuts, trying to minimize their menu prominence makes sense. 

Google being Google, they’ll probably test this quite a bit, so it’ll be interesting to see if it sticks, and if so, whether other programs will follow suit.

NICELY DONE