GlobalMenu is a Global Menu Bar for GNOME
This project introduces document oriented concepts into Gnome, and improves Gnome's respect for Fitts's law.
There are several advantages by adopting a shared global menu bar in Gnome (thanks Matthew for organizing these):
It works better with narrow windows, because the width of the menus isn't limited to the width of the window. (This is a problem for Gimp and Inkscape especially.) It's less confusing -- when two menu bars are visible on-screen at once, sometimes people choose the wrong one.