[oneeyedpigeon]

I totally take your point (yes, the 2nd image is 'better' for the most part), and it's one I considered when I wrote my comment. I think it's interesting to compare it with OSX and its global menubar.

I'd like to see a windowing system that totally revamps how we think about screens, apps, windows, tabs; menus, toolbars, etc. When should a menu be linked to an app and when should it be linked to a tab? How can we meaningfully manage all these things together? Do we really need a 5th level in this hierarchy? Is it really a hierarchy, or should an 'app' be able to overlap more than one screen? Does it ever make sense for a tab (image a 'naked' pane displaying an image) to be available to more than one app? etc.

I feel like, yes, we need to solve these issues at a higher-than-app level, because every app doing its own thing will just be incredibly confusing.

[ponyous]

Is there any incentive you know that tries to standardise how desktop apps should behave?

Just my observations & opinions: I don't think we will reach a point anytime soon where desktop apps have standardised UIs much more than now. The most effort in this space is done on iOS. Apple pushed UX Guidelines quite hard, most of the apps are mainstream consumer oriented and are not even that complex so Tab bar on the bottom + screens above works well. Desktop apps are generally much more complex and therefore harder to standardise I guess.