This is tricky to fix; the theme doesn't define any border for menus on purpose, as in non-fallback mode mutter draws a shadow around the menu.
Should we find a way to use a theme variation in fallback mode?

*** Bug 664071 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 664179 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Please note that this does not only affects fallback mode, but also GTK 3 applications on other Window Managers (like Xfce ...)

The strange thing is that this worked correctly in 3.0.2

(In reply to comment #5)
> The strange thing is that this worked correctly in 3.0.2

Yes, it was changed for 3.2.

For what it’s worth, I think the new menus look worse even inside GNOME Shell, with shadows and everything. They were perfectly fine in 3.0.x.

What was the rationale for changing this?

Can we have some feedback from designers?

I really hope to get this reverted in time for 3.4.

So as 3.4 is now released, do we have any update on that?

I had filed this in bug #662951; you might find some more information there.

I think this one is a different bug. I was talking about the black border around drop down menus (not shadows). These are shown correctly in GNOME Shell but not in non-gnome Desktop Environments or Fallback Mode.

According to bug #649374, which is referenced by bug #662951, the rationale was reducing the "in your face" effect. Fair enough.

Removing completely the border around the menus, as opposed to reducing the drop shadow while leaving a 1px gray border around them, seems to go too far in that direction.

Not only in fallback mode it is *absolutely impossible* to see how big the menu is if the application's window is mostly white (eg. gnome-terminal or nautilus), it also looks much worse and it strains the eyes much more in standard mode, because the contrast between the active menu item and the rest of the menu bar is too low.

Please consider adding a thin gray border around menus (and menu items), 1px would be enough.

#include <plea_for_reversion_for_3.56>

In the mean time, here is a workaround:

$ cat ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css 
.menu {
	border-style: solid;
	border: 1px solid @menu_separator;
}

Better yet:

$ cat ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
.menu {
    border: 1px solid @menu_separator;
}
.menuitem {
    border: 1px solid @menu_separator;
    border-bottom: 0;
}

And this is still not enough, IMHO.
Being subtle is OK, but there has to be some contrast or eye strain becomes unavoidable.

Does not change anything, here. Do I have to include the css in settings.ini?

Have you restarted the relevant application?

I just had to create the relevant file, drop the tweaked CSS in there and restart the application to see the changes.

In the past the gtk-2.0 component of the Adwaita theme has been clearlooks. This has been changed recently. The gtk-2.0 has been reworked to mimic the gtk-3.0 Adwaita look and feel.

The above 'hint' only seems to apply to gtk-3.0 apps only. So do you have a hint how to make this work with gtk-2.0 apps, too?

@Cosimo Cecchi this bug is now known for quite a long time and it is affecting more and more users, even more with the addition of the GTK2 theme.

Is there any chance to get it fixed? If it's not possible with the Adwaita engine, we could for example use the clearlooks engine for the menus, which got a proper border setting.

Please note, this is not only related to fallback mode, but to everyone who is using GNOME Apps in a non-GNOME environment with the default theme enabled.

Created attachment 225873 [details]
Screenshot showing a GTK2 menu without borders

This is now fixed in master - See [1] for details

[1] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-themes-standard/commit/?id=9c62ba404fa8a76d1c56cce4f066e94ccc637900

I have tested the patch, and it works in general.

From design point of view I guess you have decided that it would look better if pull down menus won't have a top border (which was the case e.g. with Clearlooks).

This results in pop-up/right click context menus to not show top-borders (see screenshot). I am not sure if there is a way to distinguish between menus that are opened from a menu item and general menus (like popup menus or right-click context menus). If so, please add top borders to the latter.

If that's not possible, I would like to suggest to add top borders in general.

(In reply to comment #21)

> This results in pop-up/right click context menus to not show top-borders (see
> screenshot). I am not sure if there is a way to distinguish between menus that
> are opened from a menu item and general menus (like popup menus or right-click
> context menus). If so, please add top borders to the latter.
> 
> If that's not possible, I would like to suggest to add top borders in general.

There's a way to distinguish between these two cases in GTK3 (and the fallback menu border style actually takes it into account and draws a top border for unattached menus in this case), but not for GTK2 unfortunately.

I don't think it would look really nice to have top borders rendered for menus attached to the menubar, but I'll try to play with it and see if we can improve things a bit.

Have you found a way to improve the look of the top border?

In GTK3 a very light top border is drawn e.g. to context menus. I would just suggest to add this light border to GTK2 menus in general. It should not have a noticable impact on the overall look of Menubar menus.

Created attachment 227978 [details]
dotted top menu border

I have noticed that the top menu border is a very light dotted line, already. It could be improved by replacing the dotted line with a full line which is slightly darker.