They really are. It doesn't matter if they're used on websites or in web browsers or in any other context. Time and time again it has been shown that they do nothing to help make functionality obvious and easily accessible, and instead actually make functionality much harder to discover and use.
I have seen various complaints and 'studies' about this, but I don't agree at all, as a user. Of course the functionality hidden away in menus is not 'obvious' or immediately accessible, that's the whole point. It's for stuff you don't use very often. With most apps I use, there's a handful of features I don't want to have on show all the time because it would be distracting, but I want to be able to find it when I go digging for it.
Of course lots of designers make the wrong decisions about which functionality they have openly on display vs. which functionality they hide away in menus. They often lazily shove a new feature in a menu, rather than find a way to properly integrate it with the design of the app. But that's not the same as saying "menus=bad".
Menus aren't merely about hiding functionality. They're about organizing oft-used functionality in a way that's easily and consistently accessible, while at the same time not consuming too much screen space.
The traditional horizontal menu bar with multiple consistently-titled menus is a system that has worked very well for decades. For developers and UI designers, it's generally quite obvious where menu items should go. For users, it's generally obvious where the developers would have put the menu items for some specific functionality.
The Chrome-style single-obscure-menu-with-everything-poorly-organized-inside-it approach throws all of this away. It results in the worst of all trade offs. It's harder to find, the menu itself is an inconsistent jumble, the amount of functionality within it is less, it's not worth gaining a small amount of screen space for the inefficiency such a broken menu system brings, and it's just plain harder to use. It really is bad in every way.
The sidebar says "Hila Peleg is a UX expert and designer living in Israel" - it pops in if you click the tre striped icon in the top left corner of the page
