Open app menu on hover

[jancborchardt]

Summary

The new app-menu currently requires a click to open which is an extra step, which many people complain about. Also its vertical clickable size does not extend to the height of the header bar, which makes it unnecessarily smaller and more difficult to click.

The clickable area is now extended to fit the height of the header (while the visual feedback continues looking nice like before). Also, the visual feedback is unified into one element.

And to make it quicker and easier to open the menu, @kra-mo brought up that a simple hover should do the trick (not focus though to not mess with accessibility). There is a short timeout before it opens, similar like how Amazon does on their "Sign in" and language menus in the header.

Additionally, there is a short timeout which catches clicks on the waffle menu / app icon + name so that people who are used to the previous behavior don’t accidentally immediately close the automatically opened menu.

As discussed with @kra-mo, also FYI @pringelmann so it doesn’t conflict with how you would do things, or your work in #60937

Before

Screencast.From.2026-07-01.16-00-29.webm

After

(Highlight looks like the corners are not rounded, but that’s cause of screencast compression)

Screencast.From.2026-07-01.15-55-09.webm

Checklist

• Code is properly formatted
• Sign-off message is added to all commits
• Tests (unit, integration, api and/or acceptance) are included
• Screenshots before/after for front-end changes
• Documentation (manuals or wiki) has been updated or is not required
• Backports requested where applicable (ex: critical bugfixes)
• Labels added where applicable (ex: bug/enhancement, 3. to review, feature component)
• Milestone added for target branch/version (ex: 32.x for stable32)

AI (if applicable)

• The content of this PR was partly or fully generated using AI

[susnux]

The new app-menu currently requires a click to open which is an extra step, which many people complain about

Its not the click that people complain about.
Its the fact that you first need to open the menu, then search for the entry and then click it.

Before you moved the mouse up, during that move you could already look for the entry / remember it and steer the mouse directly to the entry.

TBH I think this would make the behavior even worse, for people not liking the waffle menu it will be the same as you still need to move the mouse to the trigger, open it and re-position to the entry.
But for everyone this adds more noise, one of the worst UI things is if suddenly elements pop up if you not intended to open them and this will haven quite often here by just moving the mouse.

[susnux]

Implementation is very complex and adds a lot of things while from the description of the feature a simple addition of the popoverTriggers to the NcPopover would be enough 👀