I heard no mention of the padding in that one. There are 3 text menu items there, not 1. "Performance" | "CloudFlare" | "SEO"
Yes, I know. I didn't feel the need to restate what you said. If it makes you feel better, "Padding between toolbar menu items has always been a little janky, but it's getting slightly better."
1) This has been a problem for a long time.
2) We've made massive improvements in WP 3.8 (or with MP6, depending on your POV)
3) The onus is on plugin developers who are choosing to add toolbar menu items to ensure their menus degrade gracefully within the confines of how the toolbar works
4) This is nothing new with 3.8
I know that last one is weird, but the point is that it's not a 'new' alpha/beta issue, but one that's been going on for a while, and even though WP allows for any dev to add those toolbar items, it's always been on them to make it look right.
Which is my point. The devs need to decide "Should my menu item vanish when on a mobile? Should it switch to an icon?" IMO, you don't need quick access to those things on your phone, so I'd use wp_is_mobile and hide the menu all together. But I can't make that decision for every developer. WP made it for it's own items where it was logical and is leading by example there.
The best WP might be able to do on the fly would be to give them a 'max-width' setting and kill the overflow, but that would be just as bad a UX as the mashing we've got :/
Please do not put down old ways and appearances of doing things as unsexy and SOL. It’s not IE, but it is quite old.
Sexy was a JOKE :) It's in reference to how we talk about MP6, and was not directed at your issue. Again. HOW old is old? Quite seriously, we don't support IE6 in the WP admin anymore. If your browser's out of date THAT much, you have other issues, and should really upgrade. Heck Google doesn't support IE 8 anymore, and we still do (try to).