---
name: Menu bar extra
slug: menu-bar-extra
category: component
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A small application controlled item living in the system menu bar or
  tray, usually an icon that opens a compact panel of status and controls.
aliases:
  - name: status item
    source: hig
  - name: system tray icon
    source: community
  - name: notification area icon
    source: community
  - name: menulet
    source: community
  - name: tray icon
    source: community
tags:
  - menus
  - platform-registers
  - windowing
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - menu-bar
    - dock
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - notification-center
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: NameThatUI element index
    url: https://namethatui.com/
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: an app's icon living in the system bar or tray
---

Every desktop keeps a strip of the screen for the system itself, and lets applications
rent a slot in it. On one platform that strip is the right end of the
[menu bar](/menu-bar) and the slot is called a status item; on another it is the
notification area at the end of the taskbar and the slot is called a tray icon. The
component is the same either way: a small, always-present handle for an application that
is mostly not on screen, showing a glanceable state in its icon and opening a compact
panel of status and controls when clicked.

It is the right home for exactly one kind of software, the sort that runs continuously and
is only occasionally worth looking at. A backup agent, a VPN, a clipboard manager, a time
tracker, a music player. What all of those share is that their main window is a chore, and
that their state (connected, syncing, recording, paused) is worth reading without opening
anything. Everything else that ends up in the tray is there because the developer did not
want to be closed, which is why platform guidelines have spent two decades telling people
not to put an icon there, and why users have spent the same two decades hiding them.

The confusion worth clearing up is with the
[notification centre](/notification-center). A notification centre is a place, owned by the
system, where messages from every application collect and wait to be read. A menu bar extra
is a handle, owned by one application, that is present whether or not it has anything to
say. They sit in the same corner of the screen and they answer different questions: what
happened while I was away, versus what is this program doing right now. The neighbours in
the strip are the system's own status items and, at the other end of the window, the
[title bar](/title-bar) and its [window controls](/window-controls). Note also that a
[status bar](/status-bar) is the application's own strip inside its own window, whereas
this one lives outside every window in a bar the application does not own.

Design it as if it will be looked at for half a second, because it will. The icon carries
the state, so it needs a shape that reads at sixteen pixels in a monochrome template
(colour is often stripped by the system), and it needs to sit still: an icon that animates
in the corner of every screen is an interruption the user never asked for. The panel it
opens is a [popover](/popover) with a job, not a menu of everything: current status, the
one or two actions worth taking from here, and a way into the real application. Give it an
explicit dismissal (choose something, press Escape, click away) rather than making the
icon a toggle, and remember that on most systems the user can drag the item out of the bar
entirely, so nothing may be reachable only from here.