Isn't the better option to just not install crap on your computer? This sounds like complaining that you don't like television shows on a certain channel when you have a thousand to choose from...
Not everything that puts crap in the menubar is crap. The Google Chrome Notification is an egregious offender - it appeared without warning, ugly and unretinafied, and can only be (temporarily) removed by (1) doing everything it asks, (2) then quitting and relaunching Chrome. It's highly-visible systemwide placement for minor system-oriented tasks, and unnecessary given how much interface Chrome already has to work with. It sucks, but saying "you just shouldn't use Chrome" is a pretty weak solution for the small but conspicuous blemish.
That said, the menubar is a legitimate place for lots of things. It's great for services (eg dropbox), status (eg battery), and shortcuts (eg wifi).
It's a useful distinction from app icons in the Dock, which generally use more traditional desktop windows. I always like it when an app in the grey area (eg Twitterific) lets users choose where the icon lives. Like the author, I resort to Bartender to manage them all.
I wonder if menubar apps will eventually be moved into OSX's Notifications sidebar. I don't want them there, but I'd guess Apple prefers shoving into a drawer rather than sherlocking Bartender.
Chrome is becoming worse and worse, just to push Google's interests further. I don't get why there are still hackers who don't use just Chromium by now.
Because Chrome has flash built in and auto-updated. Chromium does not. If you need to use flash, and want to minimise security issues, then Chrome is the browser of choice.
It's a little grey bell with an ugly and nonstandard menu attached to it. It showed up the other day on my machine and I had exactly the same rage reaction as the OP.
I ended up learning that you can go to chrome://flags and disable it—but not before Google had bitten another chunk out of my formerly positive feelings towards them.
I remember when it first showed up on my machines, nothing at all would happen if I clicked on it. I only found out what this icon belonged to by successively quitting apps. It's the single most useless icon in my menu bar, it feels almost malicious. This prompted me to finally try and go back to Firefox...
Adobe CS and testflight are two pretty key tools that were camping in my menu bar, and both are tools that have been necessary for my job at some point. Not just crap I can do without
The TestFlight one drives me nuts because it's non retina. This is made worse by the fact that it's genuinely useful for me so I have to keep the blurry thing in my menu. (I upload 10-12 builds per week and it makes it easy.)
