The new macOS Ventura System Settings app has been widely criticized. I've personally written two articles criticizing it. The new macOS Ventura Share menu, on the other hand, hasn't yet received much discussion or criticism. This is due partly to System Settings taking a lot of the rhetorical focus — it's so blatantly bad! — and partly to the Share menu's relative obscurity in the system. I feel that the time is overdue for us to look critically at the Ventura Share menu, because some of the design changes to the Share menu are as misguided and bad as those to System Settings.
Here's the Share menu on macOS Monterey in Safari when I open the contextual menu on the Support link at the top of the Apple front page. (You can see "Sup" at the upper left corner of the contextual menu, where I command-clicked.)
And here's the same thing on macOS Ventura.
Technically, it's not even a menu anymore on Ventura, it's a menu item! And if I click the menu item, I get this… abomination.
Soooooo many things wrong here.
In short, the new user interface is totally insane.
Let's also look at the Share menu in the Safari toolbar. First, on Monterey.
I can navigate this menu using the down and up arrow keys.
And here's the same menu on Ventura. It's not bad looking, but I can no longer navigate the menu at all with the keyboard!
If I want to navigate the menu with the keyboard, I need to enable full keyboard navigation in the Keyboard pane of System Settings. This setting is disabled by default.
And then I can navigate the menu… but not with the arrow keys! I need to use the tab key to go down the menu, shift-tab to go up the menu. Correspondingly, the menu items no longer get selected, as on Monterey and earlier, but instead have a focus ring.
This goes against 20 years of precedent in macOS and Mac OS X. Forget your muscle memory, because Apple has just erased it. And for what reason? As far as I can tell, the new user interface is worse than the old one in every way.