Slashdot Mirror
Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon
Barence writes "Mozilla has announced that its plans to bring Office 2007's Ribbon interface to Firefox, as it looks to tidy up its 'dated' browser. 'Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menu bar is going away,' notes Mozilla in its plans for revamping the Firefox user interface. '[It will] be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon, [which is] now in Paint and WordPad, too.' The change will also bring Windows' Aero Glass effects to the browser." Update: 09/24 05:01 GMT by T : It's not quite so simple, says Alexander Limi, who works on the Firefox user experience. "We are not putting the Ribbon UI on Firefox. The article PCpro quotes talks about Windows applications in general, not Firefox." So while the currently proposed direction for Firefox 3.7 involves some substantial visual updates for Windows users (including a menu bar hidden by default, and integration of Aero-styled visual elements), it's not actually a ribbon interface. Limi notes, too, that Linux and Mac versions are unaffected by the change.
In my opinion this is a really, really dumb move. While its all eye-candy and nice, it brings down the usability a lot. If you want to get to the menu, you have to find some button from somewhere obscure location and then the menu will be vertical to begin with, like right-clicking. On top of that its one extra mouse click. I hate the same thing with Office. Another good example is MSN Messenger. I can never find the menu button, and when I do the menu looks just retarted.
The ironic thing is that a menubar is the least intrusive UI object on the screen. It's small, it doesn't get in the way and it goes nicely along with title bar. And you still find everything easily and fast from it.
This doesn't "tidy up" 'dated' browser. There a lot more issues to look at, like UI responsiveness, fast drawing of loading websites and better & smoother scrolling, in which Firefox is actually lacking behind (still wins IE tho, but thats not much)
Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.
Gladly I'm not Firefox user, and even less so with this. It seems Firefox is going more and more to the way of grandma-understands-too. While I myself more and more like the approach Opera takes; feels like a complete suite for browsing. Maybe it'll gain more marketshare for Opera in power users, who still value usability and the simple efficient things like menu bars.
I had no idea it was April already.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
It works just fine how it is now.
Please, don't.
Why take away a perfectly good, easy to use menu and replace it with that shit-tastic ribbon concept?
I can understand having it as an option for those few people who actually like the ribbon (which, IMHO reduces usability, while taking up way more space), but forcing that garbage on the general public seems like a waste of both energy and goodwill.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
There's some argument to be made that Firefox should fit in to Windows, if that's where it's running.
My question is, will this abomination also be applied to other OSes?
Menus exist for a reason (they are useful and organized), and the "Ribbon" takes up more space than the menus. The Ribbon's "Contextual" interface just means that things aren't in the same place all the time. It means that action A is not always in action A's spot, and sometimes action B is in action A's spot. It's just terrible. I guess that's the last I'll be using of Firefox.
Rather than picking the ribbon interface, why not do something new and different? If not new, at least different? In an application that I'm currently building, I use a tree structure for menu navigation where the nodes are circles with text inside them. It works perfectly for the Sims, and it works equally well for menus in my business app. There's no reason to use all of that screen real estate at the top with a dorky ribbon when you could simply have a Firefox button that expanded to different options as you drilled down.
I despise the ribbon more than MS itself. What is it in the human psyche that insists on breaking things that work? There are so many other issues to address -- why screw up a perfectly usable user interface, by replacing it with an illogical hodge-podge that, if nothing else, requires user retraining? What problem is being solved? And is it really being solved?
If you don't believe me, ask a collection of users to perform a task with the existing UI, then change to the ribbon and repeat the process. If not convinced, give the users a week to adjust to the ribbon, and repeat the test. I think you'll find that users burdened by the ribbon will perform their tasks significantly slower than those using the more efficient menu system.
The point of the ribbon was to consolidate many complicated context sensitive (in this case i mean, menu items disable and enable based on current document context) menu items/tasks into a more readily available context sensitive toolbar (making a menu bar obsolete).
However, a web browser doesn't need that many context sensitive too bar elements. Chrome, Safari and even IE 8 already has a very simplified and usable tool bar (with one or two drop down menus for more detailed options - hardly requiring a ribbon).
i just don't really get this...
If Firefox starts sporting RetardedMenu's (tm), I'm switching to IceWeasel, or I'll fork it myself. Somebody has to draw the line. Consider it drawn.
No, wait, I mean that other thing -- lame!
Ug...
That's really clever. The Ribbon is fully available to any application that doesn't compete with Office... I would have never thought about a web browser as being within that fold, but it most certainly is. IE is not part of the office ecosystem. This is smart move towards integration and a clever way to utilize the platform. However, there likely will be some backlash from purists. Might I suggest a branch of Firefox not unlike Camino for Mac? Perhaps a Windows-centric version of the Mozilla browser would be in order to better provide for the range of needs and interests in the community.
The Office 2007 ribbon is very effective for exposing contextual functionality, but it's also capable of being a lightweight interface. I am curious to see how Firefox implements this. I wouldn't anticipate it being nearly as wide open as Office's ribbon, with much of its functionality likely hidden in the globe.
Alongside some Windows 7 integration, these features could go far towards making Firefox more of a native browser and less of a competing visual element in Windows.
It was my understanding that the ridiculous license Microsoft chose for the "Office Ribbon" prevented competitors from using the office ribbon concept unless they paid a hell of a lot of money up front. Does that apply only to competitors of Office? That seems remarkably narrow-sighted for Microsoft's contract lawyers.
I assume the Linux versions of Firefox will continue to use the "messy" menus.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Just as more context as I couldn't believe it myself : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback#Hiding_of_the_Menubar However this is a dumb move ... For me, the ribbon bar is a non-intuitive piece of eye-candy which does not serve any purpose other than to assist in confusion.
Then again - I'm old school.
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
every platform should have their own native user interface, windows is no exception to linux/osx and possible others. why people get their panties in a knot about something as insignificant as this, is beyond me.
try out chrome.
April first already?
enefesdi bhootparamdi
if a thing is worth doing at all, it's worth doing right. -- H.S. Thompson
Don't we normally reserve these stories for April 1st?
Anything and everything that can be done to reduce user stress and increase user experience should be done. Old School menu bars and the xerox way of thinking is outdated and underachieved. New ways to navigate controls without disrupting your work flow should be implemented. Than advanced functionality should be build on that.
how long do you estimate a fork with a "normal" interface will take to appear?
The gallery in the original announcement makes it look like they're taking a page out of Chrome's playbook, especially for their 4.0 proposal.
Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon
Many To Replace Firefox With Opera
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
...how about a random BSOD option for Firefox also.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't mind the ribbon design. I don't think it is perfect, but I don't see a reason to hang onto to the old nested menu system that never really worked that well anyway (we just got used to it).
But please let me customize this system. I can come up with an arrangement that is far better at predicting which tools I will use most often or together than a static design can.
According to http://msdn.microsoft.com/officeui, Office 2007 UI/Ribbons is patented and one needs to get a license from Microsoft to implement Office 2007/Ribbons look-and-feel in their apps.
Microsoft can deny license if they feel the product is a threat. Does this mean they don't see Firefox as a threat to their business ?
Way to annoy the world there, Mozilla...
If they force that upon me, I'll switch browsers. Or at least not upgrade.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The day they do this, it's the day I stop supporting my extensions and I stop using this stupid browser. It just crashed on me 3 times today (I am looking at some financial sites and obviously the problem is Flash, but whatever). Instead of working on making the application more stable by separating tabs and plugins into processes and instead of working on innovative things, like maybe allowing javascript to start separate threads we'll get the ribbon? Way to brown-nose MS. By the way, I do not like ribbon, I tried using it and it blows chunks.
You can't handle the truth.
Is there a different prankster day in England?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Is this a Joke??? I guess it's time to start using Opera.
Am I the only one that's not mad at them for doing this? In the article, it clearly states that this is entirely optional. Just hold down the alt key and it'll change for you.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
I wonder how much out-cry there was when Apple introduced the dock bar or whatever it's called. Not even being a mac user, I have no idea.
It seems that people like what they are used to and are thus more efficient, right now, with what they are used to. People can argue theoretically all they want, but until you get used to it and THEN compare efficiency/usability, it's really not much of a comparison.
Chrome, IMO, has the best browser UI so far. I actually really don't like Firefox's. After you started getting multiple toolbars going across the entire top of the browser window (or Office window, or whatever), with tons and tons and tons of buttons ... eh...
IMO, tons-of-buttons seems to be an "open source" sort of thing. Throw more features at it and make it a button or menu. Example: KDE. Gnome is way better at that than KDE... but seriously, this is NOT just a Microsoft thing, and Microsoft isn't the only one that produces poor UI's. Most "geeks" seem to not care about UI that much, because they're used to complex interfaces. Most normal users aren't and probably use only what, four buttons: back, forward, refresh, and print...
Designing a UI for the geek is not what firefox, ms, apple, etc., are trying to do. They're trying to design it for the typical user. Slashdot user != typical user.
Article: "Though it will be turned on by default for Windows 7 and Vista users, they will be able to toggle between the old and new interface by holding the Alt key."
With the option to revert i don't see the big deal. Firefox if it's anything is the most configurable of the big 4 browsers so i welcome interface updates. Ribbon or no ribbon having Aero Glass is a nice touch though.
A bigger deal would be enabling Aero Peek for tabs in Windows 7.
No shark-jumping references yet?
Reason: To distract Slashdot readers from the fact that their crappy /. CSS breaks the Page-Up key. (Sorry, had to vent.)
This article, true or not, has the exact prefect headline to get the slashdot crowds grabbing their pitchforks and torches. The only headline that could possibly be better for that would be Linux Torvalds either praising windows or maybe telling us why linux sucks.
Somedays I weep for the intarwebs!
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback They're not saying that they are going to be using the Ribbon style interface. They only say that the menu bar will be replace with things like the ribbon style interface.
How many more MS inovations is Firefox going to plagerize? I vastly prefered the privacy options before the "Private Browsing" thing was added, and in general I wish they'd stop copying MS UI elements. If I wanted to use IE, I'd use IE...
Hear that strange noise?
That is the sound of the Horsemen coming from the west....
0100010001101001011001 0100100000011010010110 1110001000000110000100 1000000110011001101001 0111001001100101
1) Get a mac
2) Switch to Chrome
3) Do not upgrade firefox ever again
Dear TheMCP,
I use a PET2001. There are no menus. It has no graphical rendering. I can't even get Lynx to run on it.
This letter has as much to do with the discussion as yours does. Please take your fellatious Mac worship elsewhere.
Love,
Red Flayer
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
...anything but the ribbon.
I still can't find anything I need in Office 2007, IMO the ribbon is the biggest backwards step in usability ever.
So, um, which side of the debate are you on, anyway?
What about just using Tiny Menu? I can really recommend it if you have a laptop screen with a height of 800 pixel. I've removed the "Navigation Bar" and the "Bookmarks Toolbar" as well.
Here we have Firefox taking marketshare from IE by being just that, NOT Internet Explorer.
To follow IE or Microsofts whims makes Firefox second fiddle just like OpenOffice.
Add ontop that ribbon must be the silliest menu interface known to man. Contextual menues doesnt work because 90% of all users use their placement memory instead of really reading what the menus say. Thats why people gets all confused if you move a couple of icons on their desktop, their icon isnt that red ball, its that icon next to some other icon. Its stupid, works very badly on normal users and potentially an infringement problem begging for a real good footdown from Microsoft.
I goddamn hate ribbon, especially supporting it is a nightmare.
HTTP/1.1 400
Dear Timothy,
I use Linux. WTF is IE, WTF is a "ribbon" and why should I care?
*downloads opera*
Mozilla is all about the bling, and usability is a secondary consideration.
Check out this usability bug about resizing the add bookmark dialog. 30 votes, 88 comments, 17 duplicate bugs filed, and still no one has done anything about it.
This fancy new "add bookmark" dialog also broke a pile of screen readers and other accessibility software (although this has mostly been fixed now, AFAIK).
Looks like I'm switching to Chrome or Safari for Windows.
What the hell iz Mozilla thinking? The ribbon is a good idea? It was invented by the same folks who gave us BOB and Clippy, for Christ sake.
I'm not resistant to change. But I am resistant to crap. If Mozilla wants to trash the existing menus and start over with a UI paradigm that actually works, I'm all for it. But to replace it with *THIS*??? WHY????
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
Red Flayer 1 - TheMCP 0
Hells to the no.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I fully expected to hate that damn ribbon, but the reluctant truth is that I find the more I use it the more generally useful it becomes -- especially for exposing semi-obscure but useful Microsoft Word features (like creating cross references). Still, there's a catch. When it doesn't work it falls flat on its face and you spend the next three hours trying to figure out how to do something that should only have taken 5 minutes.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Q: What is a webbrowser supposed to do? Display web pages.
Q: What should most of the screen be? The websites.
How often do you really use the menubar? 90% of the time its wasting screenspace and as people push for a consistent UI across platforms it's worth making the change. The next move for them is to take after apple and remove the pointless status bar in favor of a safari style loading/link in the addressbar.
The ability to hide the menus is one of the many reasons i use KDE over gnome, if I'm having a conversation/watching a video/file managing I don't want to be wasting window space on a menubar i rarely use. The only advantage of a fixed menubar is that people are used it, well i for one welcome the menubutton revolution that will force people to get used to menu buttons and make this point moot.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I noticed it seemed to imply that this was only coming to the Windows versions. Which is fine by me. Go ahead and torture the Windows users, just leave the Linux version how it is!
by a malevolent jelly, no less! *shakes fist*
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
I have been using Opera for all of my browsing for the past 3 months and it behaves much better then FireFox 3.5
At least on Linux, it
- FireFox tends to freeze for a fraction of a second with too many tabs open
- has Flash issues
- Moving tabs to the side requires a plugin which is no longer maintained (useful for widescreen users)
- FireFox 3.5.3 does not pass the Acid3 test
- Awesome Bar database is freaking slow, I moved the database onto a RAM drive to make up for it.
FireFox was a good browser a few years ago, nowadays I consider it a piece of crap and user Opera 10. I only use FF when I need to use the Tamper Data plugin or if I want to customize my browser agent string.
next week they will announce that after they made thier browser totally unusable, their going to start charging $199.95 *usd) for ir. and sue everyone who has used it in the past and hasnt registered.
i guess ill start writing my own broswer, maybe i can make a logical one
Intuitive or not, the ribbon takes an awful lot of screen space. Menus are great because they store stuff neatly out of the way where you don't have to look at it until you want to; the ribbon is cluttered and doesn't leave enough screen space for me to work comfortably.
In the real world, I don't leave my tools all over the floor placed in an 'intuitive' manner; the lack of space and visual clutter would make work impossible. I put them up where I can find them.
IMHO, Firefox is going the way of Mozilla before it. It seems like every release is worse than the one before it, to the point that it's just a bloated, slow, crash-prone mess now. I'm finding myself using IE more and more recently. The thing that made Firefox take off was the fact that it was lightweight, simple, expandable, and fast. I think they've lost sight of that.
The screenshot in TFA looks nothing like the Office ribbon. The purpose of the ribbon is to make apparent the options the are usually buried within expanding hierarchical menus. In the screenshot it looks to me like they just replaced pulldown menus with pulldown buttons.
I love the Office ribbon and would be very happy to see this standard propagate into more user interfaces. I'd love to see it implemented in Firefox, but I see no such thing here.
Please god NOOOO!!!!!
The ribbon crap is beyond worthless and at best eye candy. I despise it and Microsoft for forcing it down my Windows workstation and I certainly don't want to see it on my open-source software.
I'd rather have text menus than vast numbers of tiny obscure icons.
And if we have to have tiny obscure icons, someone as good as Susan Kare is needed to design them.
Bottles will have the openings in the side, pencils will have erasers near the center, cars will have the steering wheel in the center of the dashboards, and bread will be sliced end-to-end instead of side-to-side.
The standard GUI design did not 'evolve' to use menus, it was created that way from whole cloth after years of research.Once you get used to using it the 'ribbon' makes just as much or as little sense as a menu.
Sigh. Yet another case of "Microsoft does something, so we've all got to follow suit". Seems like any time Microsoft makes a UI change, no matter whether it's liked or not, all other Windows program UIs eventually adopt it.
This is.... such a horrible idea. Office '07 is complete garbage mainly because of the 'ribbon' system. Intuitive my ass.
Tell me if this has happened to you.
You have numerous bookmarks in several folders deep. Maybe you want to keep nice & neat with your subjects & the like. So you drag & drop some bookmarks here & there. If you "miss" the drop, you have to navigate through the bookmark folders AGAIN and drop carefully. It gets a bit annoying you are trying to drag & drop a bookmark to an empty folder, where there's nothing for it to pop out.
Okay, firefox is not so bad.
Chrome's UI in general is just too slimmed down to be useful, and I slow down pretty badly. I just dun like zig zag actions, missing & having to start over. Later versions of IE are terrible with this.
When this comes out, if there is no way to continue to use a normal menu system, then it is Bye, Bye Firefox!! Wonder if Ice Weasel is also going this route!! If not then Ice Weasel it will be!!
What is it with high-profile open source projects trying to emulate Microsoft blunders, is it a sort of status thing? Firefox can give us ribbons, Open Office has Clippy what next?
Quack, quack.
The context sensitive ribbon... what 'contexts' are there exactly? I'm viewing a webpage or.... viewing a webpage. That's it! It's not like Word where I might be editing text or drawing a table, or manipulating an inserted image.
Most of FF's menus are related to the configuration of the system. And configuration of the addons. This could be a little better organized but it's certianly not broken or a priority for redesign.
Imagine trying to tell your grandma over the phone how to set an option: "Click on Tools, then click Internet Options"... oh wait... there's no more menu. "Click on the icon that kind of looks like a toolbox with a wand over it... er".
My first thought was an epicly-long "NOOOO..." but upon seeing the pic, idk. It may work. I hated Window's ribbon, but FF may make it work. We'll have to just wait and see, won't we?
Dunno where "Ribbon" came from, but whoever wrote it will probably see this Slashdot article and facepalm.
I've been following some of the dev blogs and watching ideas for the interface go around. Mozilla is clearly leaning in the direction of Google Chrome, NOT Office, in terms of how the interface will look in the future. They have a couple good ideas on their own to improve the interface (a "home tab" that replaces the home button and loads your home page. IMO that is better on the tab bar than the address bar), but generally as Apple seems to think as well (see: Safari 4) Google hit a lot of good ideas with their tabs on top and minimalistic approaches to the browser UI.
Well, this is idiotic.
From the bottom of the slashdot page: "You are not a fool just because you have done something foolish -- only if the folly of it escapes you."
Fools.
Like Firefox isn't already enough of a resource pig. No doubt this will REALLY help the situation.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
1) Get a mac
2) Switch to Chrome
3) Do not upgrade X ever again
Wow, who knew the answer was buying from your favorite computer company and using Google's browser?
Great Intellect...
just remember this fanbois. the next time you cry about where's the innovation just remember who ripped who off.
not that the ribbon makes sense in a browser but i guess when you're just ripping someone else off it doesn't have to make sense.
mwahahahahaha!
Yes, because my primary goal of switching to Kubuntu was getting more Microsoft on my computer.
If they lack creativity, or the spine to do their own thing, couldn't they at least steal from Apple instead of Microsoft? You know, actually stealing something that looks good and makes sense?
Speaking of making sense...maybe my Firefox is a freak accident of nature, but I do believe it looks different than the default FF because Firefox supports themes. There is little point in "embracing glass" and all that stuff if every single user can choose how their browser will look individually anyway.
But hey...I suppose confusing the newbies and breaking the interface is more important than...I dunno...decreasing the memory footprint? Improving the rendering speed? Passing Acid3? Multi-column layout support in CSS? Making it so the Lagsome Bar doesn't need half a minute to work fluently? Not encouraging thousands of users to send their private data unencrypted by auto-blocking sites using self-signed certificates?
You know, those things actually related to browsing?
Please tell me this is April Fools. Please.
I actually completely hide the textual menu with the addon Hide Menubar. I still leave the standard back, forward, reload and friends, but only because they're on the same bar as the address bar, which I pretty much always want visible.
I started doing this after realizing that the only elements of Firefox's UI that I actually use with any frequency is the address bar and quick search bar. For the rest of it, I'd rather just have a larger viewport. If I need the menus i just press ALT, which is consistent with the rest of a Windows Vista/7 UI that hides menubars. Incidentally, the most common reason for me to need the textual menus is to unclose a tab. This is a feature I need regularly, but not terribly frequently compared to most other functions. I hate that it's buried in the History menu - I just don't make that connection. It's also very hard to bind to mouse gestures in the common mouse gesture addons (Usability be damned, I heart my mouse gestures).
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
The Word ribbon uses up about 1/3 of the vertical space on my laptop. I feel as if I can either find the menu item easily, (x)or work on the document easily. It's not unlike having to remember to click the mouse to get window focus (Windows style) after having grown up with focus-follows-mouse mode (X11 style).
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
But the Windows Explorer contextual strip and the Office Ribbon is a main reason why i do not use either.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Maybe they're not going to go for a full sized ribbon and instead will opt for a more compact version thats appropriate for a web browser. Maybe a string or yarn. Perhaps a thread.
It was my understanding that Office went to the ribbon because there were new features that didn't naturally fit into the menu bars and the menu bar interface was getting too confusing because there were so many features. With several browsers having simplified their UI, almost to a fault I think, I don't see how a web-browser would need to make use of a ribbon. I am interested to see what they come up with though since I don't think I've seen a ribbon interface used on something that doesn't have a ton of features. I've never been a fan of it in the Office environment but, who knows, maybe the ribbon shines when there aren't a million options and features to cram into it.
If it works, great. If not, there are other browsers.
Firefox has been getting worse for quite a while now.
Perfect excuse to switch to a new browser.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I thought this was The Onion.
As long as I can shut all that fancy crap off and get a plain, simple solid window that is a web browser that I can type a URL into and have it display the page, it sounds good to me.
This isn't flamebait. It's a plea for mercy!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The quote verbatim from Mozilla's wiki (found here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback)
"Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon(now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key...Firefox isn't the type of application that necessarily has contextual actions in the same way Windows Explorer does. So how to handle the functionality of the menubar if it is hidden?"
They are just using the ribbon as an example of an interface that has eliminated the menu bar. If you read further they have mockups of the 3.7 and 4.0 interface, it looks absolutely nothing like the ribbon.
I can't agree more. I had the pleasure(?) of helping a friend take his basic "Office 2007" computer class for college. Fortunately our company didn't go to Office 2007 so it was my first experience with it. It has to be one of the most unintuitive interfaces that MS has pushed out in years.
The tabs try to present too much information in a limited space. I felt like I was playing those old Monkey Island pixel hunt games. I found it totally unnecessary to have a picture for every function I was trying to perform when simple functions like FILE, EDIT, and VIEW would serve so much easier. We ended spending more time just trying to FIND the sub tab info than we did learning about new functionality. It's almost like they did it just to make Office look 'different' but failed to realize they weren't really innovating anything. They were just putting pictures in place of easy to read text, and adding more 'clutter' in places where it wasn't needed.
I saw mockups on Planet Mozilla a while back that they had carefully thought about each part of UI and decided to greatly simply the UI. The mockups reminded me a great deal of Chrome.
I can't imagine the "ribbon" will look anything like Office 2007. I'm guessing they will take advantage of the ribbon API present in Vista and 7. That doesn't mean it will actually look like Office 2007. MS Paint in 7 uses the new ribbon API, and it looks really good.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Actually I don't really care as long as it's an option, and the old-style is still easily available. That's one thing MS didn't offer with Office 2007. One Redmond Way. What, they don't have enough money to build that? Right.
Table-ized A.I.
It looks more like IE7 or Chrome than it does any version of Office.
They:
- hid the menubar.
- condensed common menu items into Page and Tools drop-downs, to apply to the current page and whole app, respectively.
- merged the search and address bars (which imo should never have been separate--I always hide the search bar).
- merged some other buttons (stop/reload etc.).
- plan to simplify the 4 different ways to access bookmarks.
Full description of mockup here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback
Other than a brief mention of possibly adding ribbon styling, none of the above looks much like Office ribbons to me.
Huh, well, Republicans are against eye-candy at the cost of usability, too. That's their primary argument against big government.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
It is one thing to change for the better and another for the sake of newness. You can claim a ton of research, but at some point people are forced to use it and that is how we know what a complete failure it has been in practice. I can't tell you how many times I've been accused of selling ms users of mine a mickey mouse-and maybe fraudulent
sellout!
Great, they were the answer to a crappy browser, and now they are going the way of that same crappy browser.
I really hate the IE interface and Office 2007 has only been a greater pain.
Thanks for listening to your users guys!
Here I come to save the da... *thud*
I gotta get me a shorter cape.
I am a Firefox user, and before that Seamonkey, and this is just the _MOST_ stupid thing they have ever done, and Redmond will laugh all the way to the bank as these idiots are legitimizing them. Thank god for Google, Chrome and the IE plugin, _reverse_ embrace and extinguish.
The Mozilla guys want to focus on (a) security and (b) core functionality ie a good JS engine, HTML5 and CSS.
My initial response, of course, was "OH GOD PLEASE NO!"
My second thought was a more tempered "hmm... then again, you never know. They might actually get the ribbon right."
My third thought was a less-than-optimistic "LOL".
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Are the firefox developers just looking for ways to ruin it? Or are these someone's pet projects? resume padding? Why not just branch the code and call the new, bloated browser something else?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
The Microsoft context sensitive ribbon takes us from the useability of a well organized file cabinet to that of a jet airplane cockpit that doesn't have the decency to keep the same button in the same place from one minute to the next. It is an awful, awful design, and emulating it is a huge mistake.
Interesting direction with the "ribbon" bar. I must be in the minority, because looking at the one mock-up I'm looking forward to this change. I hardly use anything in the menu bar, and it looks far more minimalistic which I like. I'm reminded of Chrome as well, which isn't too bad. I'm more concerned about certain add-ons though. Hmm.
Bitter, not morose.
this is what i read "Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon", this is what I heard as i read it "Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon then in three years time, Firefox will claim it did it first when IE9 goes down the ribbon route and sue Microsoft for using a GUI feature Microsoft actually created"
portfolio
They're emulating the Internet Explorer and Chrome interfaces. There's a lot of wasted horizontal space on your browser toolbar so they're taking the menus and lumping them in with the other toolbar buttons. There's no reason a browser needs a whole menu bar when a few toolbar buttons can do the job.
The biggest selling point of OpenOffice and Firefox to me is the lack of screen vomit (or ribbon interface if that is what you want to call it). It takes up screen real estate, is very unintuitive and as has been mentioned a huge waste of time. It is not only ugly it reduces productivity to a level that most companies should fear. I would back up what I am saying with some numbers and tests but that would require that I use a Microsoft product that is so ugly as to be offensive and I can't stomach it. I know this is only the personal opinion of one human on the planet, but so be it. Let it be known that IMHO this concept only needs a screen shot to protect it from patent infringement, because once someone sees it they will probably shelve the idea of using it for all eternity and shoot or fire any employees who disagree. If Firefox goes to this without the option to use the clean more useful menus I will find another browser, even if that means going to lynx.
I can't fault your dark and twisted logic.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
I hate ribbons. The only positive thing I can think of about this change is thank god we won't be forced to upgrade to it.
Happy to keep on using SeaMonkey (even if I already miss the classic Netscape theme in future SM 2.0)...
Ribbons? Ribbons!?! We don't need no stinkin' ribbons!!!!
The thing to ask yourself, remember all the controversy over the ribbon? It never went away, people got bored and accepted it but how many mothers, grandmothers, non-computer college students, etc find the ribbon more useful? The dozens of people I've seen use the computer LESS with vista\o2k7 and now I get call on "how to print" or even "how to change fonts". I never got that with o2k3. I'm pushing OO not because it's better but because non computer people like menus. A ribbon for firefox will just do more to drive the non-geeks away.
-Joe
The first job I was assigned a desktop with Office 2007, I saw the damn ribbon, lost 15+ mins finding my way around and promptly installed OpenOffice.
I hope somebody is working in a fork, browsers don't/should not have that many options, just show me the damn web pages.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
I don't know about everyone else, but I generally prefer configuration and choices over conventions provided that the choices are logical and make sense within context. If I wanted the Gods of GUI to choose for me then I would run MacOS and use Safari. Will someone please remind Mozilla (if it hasn't occurred to them already) that the primary advantage of their platform over the competition is choice? I don't mind them including ribbons as a choice. I don't even mind if they make ribbons the default choice as long as there are choices and I can choose the "classic" menus if I don't enjoy ribbons.
Do they understand that the ribbon adds significant real-estate to the part of the browser that does not show content? That we're already trying to read web pages through a letter slot on netbooks as it is? Do they understand that widescreen displays have extra desk space on the sides but top to bottom have less room than a comparatively priced academy ratio monitor? And it's that same diminishing vertical space that is taken up by junk like this? Whoinhell makes these decisions?
What they really need, rather than mindlessly copying what M$ is doing, is a new paradigm. One that has a minimum frame around the content and some other way to manipulate the browser. Browser controls should not compete with content, dammit. The fastest growing PC segment is portable devices, not huge pieces of glass on reinforced desks. Gaah.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If Microsoft really offers the ribbon functionality freely to applications which aren't competing with Office, it could very well become a Bait & Switch trap that would require Firefox to rollback the changes or reimplement the ribbon functionality themselves. They should be prepared for this kind of scenario if they really are about to convert the Windows UI.
Ribbons are great in Wordpad, but infuriating in Word.
When you need tons of features, the best way to organize them is hierarchically, and the best way to navigate that hierarchy is to be able to see every item in the level you're currently in, and the one you just came from.
Putting options right out front like that works best when you can put EVERY option right out front.
Best. Seinfeld reference. Evar.
Remember that wonderful default in Windows that forces you to hold down the Alt key to see which letters on menu items identify the shortcut keys? I make sure that's always turned off when I use a computer. Firefox better have a way to *permanently* restore the menus, without holding down the ALT key (not to mention hide the #$%&@% ribbon), or I guarantee you there'll be a fork!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Stop trying to I don't like things the way they are now compared to the way they used to be."
this minimal menu system is actually pretty pervasive in the web browser world. ie7 and chrom* browsers do this and it doesn't mean that any functionality is lost. While I hade the idea of style over function, if done correctly, minimizing the menu could result in more screen real estate for webpage rendering. I don't know about you but I spend 99% of my time in web browsers looking at content not jacking around with the menu. So what if the menu is an extra click away. As long as not configuration options are sacrificed and as long as it doesn't take any extra resources, I could go for this change 100%
I LIKE complexity and the power provided by many options. It's why my computer has over a hundred buttons on it. If I wanted a gameboy or an iPhone, I'd have a gameboy or an iPhone. But I don't. I have a computer with a mouse and the ability to navigate with precision through a complex GUI.
Photoshop is a great example of uncompromisingly complex software not written for idiots; it's a brute to learn, but once you've surmounted the bell curve, you can solve any problem about six different ways at high speed.
Driver software also suffers from "Stupid Creep". --Early versions of device drivers are generally so full of options that you can fine-tune your machine to do exactly what you want it to do. Then, almost invariably, the designers read, "How Steve Jobs Made A Billion Dollars" and start deciding on your behalf which functions you don't need and remove them, plugging in half-baked AI's to think for you, or simply dumping you in the middle of whatever average behavior is expected and leave no option of escape. --Snatching away functions and choices and all the things I like so that the average drooling user can operate their scanner or whatever without the need for higher brain functions. Like those computer consoles in "Idiocracy".
Lame.
Fortunately, old versions of software are available on the web and PC's are still highly configurable. --I can understand the desire of the Mozilla folks to want to stay current, but they're on their own with this one.
I'd add, "Get off my lawn!" except I enjoy the sound of kids playing outside. Just so long as it's not with hand-held video games.
-FL
Am I the only one who realizes that all they did was replace the menus and toolbars with a menu of toolbars? Why does anyone act like this is an advancement at all? I mean it looks like an improvement in their product, but that's just because of what a complete mess they had made of their old menu system.
This sentence no verb.
Please, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO[this wail interrupted for lameness filter]OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I never get why you need a + button to open a new tab. If you are opening a new tab, that means you need to type the URL, that means you hand would have to be on the keyboard and it's faster to press Ctrl-T. So the + button seems a waste of space. I hope it can be removed.
Haven't we had that argument a couple of times here already? Anyway : the reason you had trouble with it is not because it isn't intuitive, it's because you're very fluent with and accustomed to the old UI.
Here's a nice little car analogy : if you gave a modern car to someone used to a Model T, he would find changing gear awfully counter-intuitive, have to learn to drive again almost from the scratch, and complain loudly that it worked just fine so why the hell change it. The modern approach is still better.
Jesus, here we are on Slashdot, and people are bitching about Microsoft not maintaining backards compatibility...
PRESS F11 YOU WHINER! Problem Solved.
On Mac and Linux I will use the menubar because it is one of the best UI ideas - right up there next to the mouse. I think the Ribbon is a good idea for many windows users... except those who need to retrain as a result of it.
I really liked the new ideas behind the ribbon when I 1st saw it. Using it for a while I quickly hated it and realized that power users did not need it. I would think IT support would hate it even more-- try telling somebody to pick a menu item over a phone when the menus are presented as a 'ribbon'.
Honestly, its not that new of an idea. It made me think the desktop was going towards the web; I've seen many websites with navigation similar to the 'ribbon' and MS just decided to look less desktop like and more like some web app.
I MISS CLIPPY! BRING CLIPPY BACK! He did almost as much as the ribbon did to get people to switch to open office.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Don't get me wrong. I love Firefox, am using Linux right now, and could never go back. But this is the "imitation, not innovation" I'm always ranting about, and that I always get modded down for, right there!
Why can't they for once do something new. Something groundbreaking. Something that makes sense. A killer feature.
Instead it all too often looks like cherry-picking the most hated "features" from Microsoft (who obviously always had it from someone else), and implementing them badly.
Until now, Firefox was the cool exception of this rule.
The worst offenders are still KDE and Gnome, for making their UIs and functionality partially virtually indistinguishable from Windows (even those stupidities like the new Vista start menu are there!), and OpenOffice which recently also imitated the MS Office ribbon, and before that, tried very hard to become more MS Office like.
The big problem is: As long as we keep staying in the shadow of others, that is where we force ourselves to be. I think this is the number one reason we still don't have the Year of Linux on the Desktop: Personal insecurity in the leaders of those projects, to have their own grand vision, and to strongly stand behind their view of reality.
So please, to all you open source developers out there: Stop caring what *everybody* thinks of you! STOP IT! Inform yourself, set your target, and proudly keep going in your direction, still listening to things that make sense, but not letting them throw you off of your things, when *you* know that they make sense!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Actually, on a modern car, with the exception of park and lower gears (which most people STILL don't understand), on an automatic transmission, they don't have control over the shifting anyway. He would probably appreciate the power steering and brakes as well. The driving interface is quite possibly the best user interface I know of, because the basic design hasn't changed since the days of the horseless carriage.
To continue with your car analogy, the switch to the ribbon is like switching a car to a joystick... It might be more intuitive for younger people (who play too much Xbox), but it isn't necessarily the best tool for the job.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
WHAT? They dare to go the way of the riddler? I should give them a sharp stick in the bookshop. I hope it will be easier to use or I'm going back to the old one. Maybe.. a more Plasma-esque theme to make it look more like kde4?
What about Firefox users who choose to use it because of its cross platform support, similar functionality on Windows, linux, and Mac?
Do you really want a "ribbon" on linux or Mac?
More of a reason to switch to Chrome, or if you are privacy sensitive, SRWare Iron. Running the dev channel means I can get extensions, which allows for the opportunity for ad block.
Firefox is just to damned slow. Maybe if they speed the whole damn browser up I'll look at it, sense Firefox's extensions are still better, but by the time Firefox 4 comes out, Google should have extensions very working well.
To wit, I've been using TinyMenu to get rid of the menu bar completely (replacing all the menus with one small button which I have placed to the left of a search box, itself to the left of the address box, all above the bookmarks bar) for years now.
Do people actually use the menus much? And the navigation buttons? Seriously?
Mod parent down.
The ribbon system allows for the logical grouping of actions by function.
What, exactly, is logical about the Home ribbon in Excel then? SMASHED in with cut/paste is formatting and sorting. None of which are particularly clue-ful or present any sense of order whatsoever.
How come there isn't a 'File' tab with lots of file functions smashed together?
In addition, every common action can be performed in two mouse clicks or less: one to select the ribbon governing what you would like, and one more to select the specific action.
Opening a file? at least three clicks. Printing? three clicks. Sorting? At least two, probably more clicks for most sorts. Data activities? Three clicks at least. Stop spreading misinformation
I'll give you the undo/redo buttons conform to your claims, and there is 'buttonizing' of some things that Microsoft probably had complaints about, but as broadly as you make your claims they are materially false.
Please, don't change the scope of your sweeping declarations in order to for your claims to approximate truthiness.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Yuck. I think I need a stiff martini !
DON'T DO IT, MAN!!! I will desert FF for anything else(exceptIE8) that does not have a ribbon. If they default to the ribbon, I am out. I don't care if it's one key to switch.
F the ribbon!
While I'm at it, I'm tired of the shit force-feedings, so F the cloud & F web2.(h)0, too.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
The Office2003 style and new Ribbon style are just so ugly. I have steadily avoided them, they do not look like Windows applications.
If Firefox styles into Windows then why bother using Firefox?
Windows, in the long term, is dying off, so why copy it ?
Actually some of the earlier cars used quite different controls. There's a Top Gear bit on it, and I'm sure someone else will save me having to search Youtube for it.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I rarely use Firefox's actual menus for anything. I have an addon to hide the entire menu bar to one button. It saves on viewable browser space. I know the hotkey for history and I have my top bookmarks available as icons on the hotbar any rarer bookmarks i access through the awesomebar. I doubt I'll be needing more than this so I will hide the ribbon layout as well which takes even more space than a menu bar.
Pic of my menu bar
Many people have tried to eliminate or reduce traditional pull-down menus in apps, over the years. You saw it happening primarily in the apps geared towards "creative professionals" more than anything else. (Likely because they thought that crowd would be more receptive to the changes and experimentation!)
Anyone remember the suite of Kai's PowerTools,for example? They eliminated practically all menus, opting for things like blobs of color in the corner or middle of the screen that split off into more shapes that performed various functions when clicked.
And what about the concept of "drawers" of tools that expand or collapse into a small bar down the corner of the screen? Many photo editing packages used that idea.
The "ribbon bar" isn't too bad in concept. I think where Microsoft doesn't quite get it right, though, is where they try to present only the functions they think a user will want, at a given point in time. If you want to do something that's not within that scope, the ribbon GUI suddenly becomes more hindrance than help. (EG. Say you want to do a mail merge in Word? I think it was easier with the traditional menus than with the ribbon bar.... and honestly, Word *never* really made that the most user-friendly thing in the world to begin with!)
FireFox might be able to make a ribbon bar work a little bit better, actually, because a web browser doesn't really offer a user as many functions as a word processor or spreadsheet. Most of the things that happen do so on and in the CONTENT itself.
You only need 1 platform. And no, it's not windoze.
1. Look here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback
Does it look like the ribbon to you? Me neither. Ribbon is a tabbed toolbar. In the Firefox mockup they have no tabbed toolbars, they just removed the menu bar, and turned the two items that are actually used from it into toolbar buttons. PC Pro calling this a ribbon is disingenuous and misleading.
2. I have an impression that this is MS astroturfing that they deployed in order to justify spending a ton of money on an interface that is less usable that 15 year old menu bars, and loathed by a significant portion of their userbase.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
>>>people are bitching about Microsoft not maintaining backards compatibility...
Well I've tried and failed multiple times to make Wing Commander operate on Microsoft and failed spectacularly...... but never mind that. - Improvement is only an improvement if the overall usage is improved. Yeah I know you're probably thinking "No shit sherlock", but that basic idea is something many people overlook.
The current interface presents a nice CLEAN list of commands, which can be quickly and easily scanned. The new ribbon interface presents a confusing mess of pictures and words that make a "quick scan" very difficult. It's the computer equivalent of tacking an organized library, and just randomly tossing books everywhere. Yes the books might be neatly arranged, but they are still random to the eye, and finding the book you want becomes very difficult.
Put the books/menu commands back in a nice, serial order so the human eye can scan and find what it's looking for.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
by which I mean, NO!
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
Bad. Very bad. The "ribbon" is impossible to use. It might be better in a browser, where there are fewer options available.
This has nothing to do with backwards compatibility. This was a change for the sake of change. The menu's offer no more functionality they did before.
How is this any more intuitive? If I want to format a piece of text, I would typically highlight the text and go to the FORMAT menu and pick the type of formatting I want to apply (font, paragraph, bullets, etc. Now? I click on Home? Never would have guessed that. Once there, I get this? How is it more intuitive to show me every single option that I might possibly use, all bunched up on a inch of screen?
The whole idea of tabs is to categorize your work into manageable chunks, but they've taken the tabs, and just thrown everything into a tab, all displayed at once. Not very managed IMO.
I like computers because I like to think. So what's the point of not allowing me to think when using a computer?
User Interfaces are always totally wrong and counterproductive. The best invention is a command line and believe it or not, I prefer it.
To be frank I was horrified when I read the title, but when you look at the mockups, it's doesn't seem to be as bad as the Office 2007 Ribbon.
For one thing it doesn't try to be "context aware" and it doesn't move everything into (partly) illogical categories/tabs. It also retains much of the menus, but moves them to a couple of buttons at the end of the address bar.
To quote from the MozillaWiki article (emphasis mine):
So it would seem that Firefox is moving more toward Chrome or Safari than towards MS Office. This is a good thing, I for one think that the Chrome UI is pretty slick, despite the fact that I'm a Firefox user.
The big mistake is calling them "Microsoft Office Style Ribbons" ... no way people will like those.
If they do them more like the contextual tool bars in Adobe products (like Illustrator or InDesign), then MAYBE it'll work well (but you'll note that Adobe also leaves the menu bar there).
Only downside I can see is that you don't use anywhere near as wide a range of different tools in a web browser as you use in a page layout program (or word processor, or spreadsheet program) so it seems to me that a contextually changing "ribbon" or "tool bar" is somewhat unnecessary.
The web browser interface as it is works so darn well that EVERY browser is a variation on the basic design (menus, below that "back" "forward" "home" and "stop/reload" buttons with a "location bar" and now a search box).
Change just for the sake of change is stupid.
*sigh*
We've been using menus for a quarter century. Everyone over the age of 3 knows that if you click on a word at the top of the frame, you'll get a drop-down. I can't find anything in the latest version of Word. I'm sure the ribbon will be intuitive as soon as I get used to it... wait, that isn't really the definition of intuitive, is it?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Apple has a look and feel that screams Apple. Most vendors comply with the look and feel. That Aqua, gray and blue like look.
GNOME has a HIG that they really would love for everyone to follow. You're not forced to but, you can almost spot the applications that don't follow the GNOME HIG. That makes up a lot of the look and feel, add Ubuntu's wonderful brownish / orange; Fedora's blueish; or SuSE's green everywhere and you have a look and feel that screams the distro's GNOME.
Microsoft has the Aero glass and wonderful (*snicker*) ribbon. Microsoft is slowly getting everyone on the glass and ribbon theme. There is no absolute rule that you must use glass and ribbon styles on your Microsoft application, but people notice when it doesn't match up. It gives Microsoft that Post-XP look and feel.
In the end, operating systems are trying to make a look that defines them, that people can easily recognize. Much like Google has their own look and feel of blue and flat that they've got going on. People identify readily with a unique look and feel and that is, in a nutshell, cheap advertising. There is nothing wrong with developers not going along with the look and feel an OS uses, Winamp comes to mind as a big one, but it automatically points out that the user is using something different, something not part of the OS; and if the OS is using a really slick look and feel with all kinds of neat effects, not going with the OS look and feel makes you look dated, or posing (if you're trying to do your own slick look and feel effects.)
For 90% of us here on Slashdot, this is all just a bunch of useless eye candy. However, it's a real important factor for the other whatever percentage of the general population who just buy into marketing hype.
Chrome looks out of place on Windows sans the glass effect. It looks like a giant blue rubber browser. However, that doesn't mean that it is silly, just looks exactly not like a Windows Vista/7 application. We can debate the merits of looking like a Windows application till the cows come home, point being it looks out of place.
Whatever your take is on the ribbon UI, I won't argue you there, but that's where Microsoft looks like they're heading for general UI, just like Mac OS X puts the menu bar at the top of the screen. It's just part of that look and feel and companies are very geared to have a distinct look and feel so that people can instantly recognize that the product in use.
So are we going to toss stones at Mozilla for actually going the with the look and feel of a Windows program, when they try to achieve the same on Mac OS X and Linux? I think the better answer for all the people who are heading down to the rock quarry is: If you do not like the glass/ribbon look and feel, maybe you should change to an OS that matches the way you want it to look?
I can almost hear the angry replies, but I will say this in my defense. The look, feel, and usability of a given OS is a marketable thing. I ditched Windows when I saw what they were going to do with Windows post-3.11. I couldn't stand it, but I understood that this was the way Microsoft was going (start buttons, browser like file navigation, etc...) I can not fight a war with a company that is trying to market stuff. So, I switched to an OS where I could dictate how things are going to work, Linux. I've not looked back since.
We just need to understand that Mozilla is bringing their application to look like a Microsoft application, just like they did with the Linux version of Firefox when they added GTK+ integration. Just like they are trying to do with making Firefox look like a Mac OS X program. So, come on, if you don't like the direction MS is taking with their look and feel, stop waiting for more applications to break ties with the Microsoft look and feel. Instead, switch over to an OS that matches what you want. It's not that hard really, and after a few weeks, you won't notice the difference. Let's make peace, not cast stones.
to summarize the majority view
...quite possibly the best user interface I know of, because the basic design hasn't changed since the days of the horseless carriage.
No. People like what they are used to, but there is no automatic connection between time and usability. My father was brought up with a currency here in the UK that until 1971 was a total headfuck. You should have seen the howls of pain from those who tried to make out that base 10 was utterly confusing.
How on earth you can equate longevity with usability is utterly beyond me.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Right ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The summary is totally false, and badly misrepresents what the full article actually says.
Once the bleeding dismembered quote is replaced in its context, it simply notes that Vista/Win7 don't use menu bars, and these are generally replaced by ribbons. Firefox needs to do something to replace these missing menus, that's all.
So let's all stop panicking. Current plans are apparently to make it look like Chrome, not Word.
As far as I know, there still isn't an option anywhere in the GUI (even about:config) to disable the new tab button. Why? It's useless, just press CTRL+T. I have to use custom CSS to get rid of it.
I like having a separate search box as well. If not only to keep something in persistently.
Fellatious or fallacious? They both kinda make sense...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Because that would motivate more people to switch to Mac (with its awesome searchable menus)?
I don't think I will like this on FF. BUT in office it works. I actually like it.. I can find features that I used to use and always had to google for at my finger tips..
IMHO the office ribbon bar is the menu system for office finally done right.
will it work in FF? I don't know.
More annoying than this is as of FF 3.5 you can now longer kill the instance if you close the last tab.. Instead it is noop or blank, that's fucking annoying!!!
I still think the current office higher ups are lotus 123 fans. The way that excel 2007 looks is very much like lotus 123 from way back. Since word, power point, and excel are to go hand in hand, they all got a similar interface. Anyone else notice that outlook and publisher did not get the ribbon interface?
I hate the ribbon. If you go from one monitor size to a different one, the ribbon changes what is shown. This can be a big pain to explain to people with smaller monitor resolutions. And let us not forget all the people who hide the ribbon by accident.
How can it be eye candy? It looks like crap.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
ribbons are stupid
For an even more recent example, look at the United States and its reasons for not switching to the (clearly superior) metric system.
(Note: I'm a US citizen)
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
My biggest problem with the system is the strict use of pictorial representations of functions. I don't know what "Properties" or "Insert" or "Cross Reference" is supposed to look like. Nor would anyone be able to describe to me how to find them since they would be describing a tiny icon picture which I would then have to interpret instead of using a single word explanatory statement.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Someone at Mozilla needs to read Mythical Man Month. Trying to guess what you need to do to get the right context so you can get the menu item you want is silly.
The broken slashdot CSS causes arguments to reappear and repeat, often from the beginning.
signature is pants
Firefox doesn't have the responsiveness of either Safari, Chrome or Opera, neither does it have the superior one-process-per-tab model of Chrome.
Firefox on linux has particularly sucky performance and some awful problems that haven't been fixed for years. It's so bad, your stand a better chance with the chrome beta.
But I can see how switching to one of the most complained about GUI layouts of recent times may successfully distract people from Firefox's other flaws :)
To continue with your car analogy, the switch to the ribbon is like switching a car to a joystick... It might be more intuitive for younger people (who play too much Xbox), but it isn't necessarily the best tool for the job.
Men In Black 2, the hyper speed control of the car is replaced with a PS2 controller. The brought-back Agent Kay doesn't know how to use it.
signature is pants
The ribbon system allows for the logical grouping of actions by function.
That's awesome if you are the guy who decided what goes with what function.
Not so awesome when the rest of us have trouble understanding some of the groupings, or are expecting something to be under one group when they are actually under another.
With a menu you could quickly go over two groups and read textually what was there to understand the gestalt behind the grouping. With ribbons you click and get a Predator style set of mysterious images that you then have to discern the function of. Even when there is text under them it's not orderly text so it takes far longer to parse.
I liked 'em at first but I would never use one if I could avoid it now.
Gone are the submenus nested three layers deep.
And hello to the Minnesota Bar - The Bar of Ten Thousand Icons. There was a reason they were three levels deep. If I wanted to flatten out something from the depths I'd assign keybindings to it thanks, not drag up everything on earth to the same level. Sort of like affirmative action for icons, the functions I want suffer because we must Leave No Feature Behind.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can understand wanting to get rid of the menu bar. I can go several days without touching the menu because essentially everything you really need to use the browser is the address bar with associated buttons. I haven't researched whether there is an option for it or not, but hiding the menu and getting back even that little bit of screen real estate would be nice assuming I can show it again if I need it. Whether or not ribbon is usable doesn't matter as it's unlikely to get used much in the first place, as long as there is some way to access those functions when they're needed. It would be silly to switch to the ribbon as there's very little contextual command changing in a browser. The picture in TFA looks fairly appropriate for a browser, but I don't think even this is needed.
That said, several other commenters asserted that the ribbon is better than menus because it organizes commands by function, but doesn't a menu do the exact same thing? Perhaps the menus just need better names and organization, not a large, expanded, pictograph version taking up more screen space than really necessary. The only real plus is that once you've selected the ribbon you want, you don't have to go back to it like you do with a menu. A menu has the benefit of giving you an easy way to navigate to every available option, even if it makes the common options a little more obscured. A properly design menu can still have the common options readily available while still giving access to the lesser-used options, which is hard to do with the ribbon (unless you add a menu to it). Besides, if it's such a common task, shouldn't it have a keyboard shortcut that you've memorized so you don't have to stray from what you're actually trying to do? If the ribbon is easier for new users it's more likely due to better organization that could also be implemented in a menu system. The ribbon is basically a menu that's always open.
You are all complaining about a complete non-issue. But this is /., so that's to be expected. The ribbon actually IS a much better menu system once you get used to it. All the normal things that most users generally use are pretty easy to find, and many of the mid-level and intermediate things they weren't already aware of are presented more easily. And, the shortcut keys for advanced users weren't changed for the most part.
Most people who actually give the ribbon a chance get used to it in about 2 weeks - much better than most software changes as big as moving to the ribbon. It's just the people railing against it for the sake of railing against change who can't handle it.
Get over it. Not all change not initiated by YOU is bad.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
That's just a fucking stupid idea.
I hate those ribbons. Give me back my toolbars! :(
I'm affraid I have to change brorsers again if FF gets ribbons too
Privacy is terrorism.
Sorry, wrong. If you gave a modern car to someone who has only ever driven a Model T they will very rapidly learn how to drive it properly and will find it much easier than driving a Model T. Modern cars have electric ignition and, predominantly, automatic transmissions. After little more than 5 minutes instruction a Model T driver should find driving a modern car to be intuitive and straightforward. Compared to the process of changing gears and setting the throttle on a model T, simply using a single pedal to accomplish the work of 2 pedals and 2 levers is a massive increase in usability.
Also, at this point in time ignoring the existing user base is a dumb business move, they're as much a source of revenue as anyone else.
If he had trouble with it, regardless of his previous experience, then it's because it's not intuitive! Where intuition means the ability to use the product without reading manuals, looking up online help, etc.
Incidentally, the ribbon interface has precisely nothing to do with backwards compatibility.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Because of the Model T's UI you were limited to gears (pedal down for first gear, pedal up for top gear.) So when they switched to a more modern car UI you got increased functionality (3 gears or more.) Also keep in mind that the model T had two levers on the wheel (throttle and spark advance) and like 4 pedals. I don't mind learning a new system if it give me increased functionality, or if it adds the ability for someone with less than 4 feet and less then 3 arms to drive a car.
It seems to me that this UI switch doesn't add functionality; it just makes it prettier and maybe easier for that one mythical person who has never seen a computer before to finally learn how to use them. It is as if a major car maker decided to move the clutch from the left pedal to being next to the parking break. Maybe that would make the UI prettier and would be easier to parallel park but not enough to justify having to learn two systems and then having to switch back and forth if you change cars.
My first car was a North American Escort from the early 80's. The engineers moved the horn from the wheel to a stalk on the side. When other people drove my car they would slam on the wheel to honk the horn with no affect. After I got a newer car it took me years to relearn the horn UI. Whenever I wanted to honk the horn I would turn on the wind shield wipers. Unlike MS, I think Ford learned their lesson and will never again move such a basic function to a strange location even if there probably is a good reason for the move.
"Here's a nice little car analogy : if you gave a modern car to someone used to a Model T, he would find changing gear awfully counter-intuitive, have to learn to drive again almost from the scratch, and complain loudly that it worked just fine so why the hell change it. The modern approach is still better."
He'd have far less to do (no manual start, no manual spark advance) and since people of that generation had a MUCH stronger mechanical background than is average today, he'd be able to pick it up easily. He'd understand a conventional clutch (common then) as easily as the Model T transmission which is an ancestor (using manually actuated bands) of modern automatics. Given the rapidity with which the Model T was supplanted by vehicles with modern features, it's arguable how strongly a "T" owner would reject change. I grew up with mentors whose early cars were Model T Fords (cheap back in their youth) and while they were nostalgic enough to collect and enjoy restoring 'em, they preferred 1950's and later vehicles for regular use.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
What's the alternative, on Windows? Is there an equivalent to Camino on the Mac with a standard native UI and the Gecko rendering engine?
C'mon, really. Is it April 1st already?
Who cares about the ribbon. Just use Vimperator.
This guy nicely defines the mentality behind bloat:
"Office had a problem--people weren't finding and using the new features."
He thinks the reason most people weren't using new features was because they couldn't find them. Never enters his mind that 99% of people don't want or have the slightest need for the new features. The 1% that want them probably could find them.
How about spell check as a 'new feature'. It's been on the menu bar and button bar for years and now it even auto-highlights while you're working and people still don't bloody spell check.
fork it dude, let's go bowling.
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa
This is more or less a dupe.
Facebook is the new AOL
I smell something fishy going on. Between this and OpenOffice tentatively "accepting" the ribbon theme, discussed here some time ago, as the new theme for OO.org 3 (right? could be wrong, too drunk to fact-check that verison...), it's starting to get stinky. Two of the biggest competitors from the OSS market, Firefox and OpenOffice.org, are considering - seriously - the "ribbon" layout. Who is paying out to make sure this sweet hard-to-use change in interface is adopted in OSS solutions? Would it not make sense to say "hey, if we can get our competitors to take on the look and feel of our products, then users will still credit us with the interface they'll see for the next 5-10 years?"
MS has a good chance of branding products they don't own by supporting, either through lobbies of internet users or sheer evil voting proxies, interface redesigns of their competitor's products. Even if a user isn't using an MS product, odds are they will now see the iconic "ribbon" and think "this doesn't work like Word or IE, but, oh! it isn't Word or IE - I guess I'll go download that now since these other softwares are just copying the original."
And people, particularly Americans, don't like imitation.
The idiotic marble isn't really a part of the ribbon. There should have been a "file" tab as part of the ribbon design. But your example does illustrate a major design flaw -- the ribbon simply doesn't cover every feature available to the program, and the stuff they didn't put in the ribbon they just shuffled into a catchall menu, but they made sure not to make it look like a menu because, you know, they're doing away with menus...
As a side note, it looks as if OpenOffice is creating a prototype UI that "kinda sorta" emulates the ribbon idea. Can't remember the link offhand.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Whaaat? I don't get the point you're trying to make here. The new interface is great and is highly intuitive, makes sense in newer application types, and old people will probably be OK with it when they understand what's going on.. but it doesn't make sense when we're trying to get work done. Is that the gist of your argument here? I hope not because it's hurting my brain a lot.
Seriously, these arguments that the menu interface is a standard that must stick is absurd. The menu was designed because it was good at hiding information and functions that would otherwise take up yards (yeah, I did that) of screen real estate back when 320x240 was the norm. We have the luxury of vast amounts of screen space to bring forward far more intuitive interface designs that make sense with ever growing amounts of application functions that a menu system simply doesn't make sense with.
To say that menus should remain the standard is like saying the start menu makes perfect sense. The menu system can be kept in line for only so long until it turns into a mess of hidden capabilities that require far more knowledge about the software to do something than the actual work being done. That, to me, is very poor design.
If not, then i guess ill have to stop using Firefox..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why is Firefox going backwards in usability? Despite all the publicity surrounding Microsoft's Ribbon bar, why do people put it in their software? Its horrible. It makes usability really suffer. What to do is not obvious. Where is the menu bar? Dunno, I can't see it. Hmm, well what do I do to get to see it? Dunno, its hidden. Try something. Like what? I dunno. Many minutes later after a lot of random mouse clicking (which does nothing) and key pressing, someone presses "Alt", at which point the menu magically appears. Wow, thats intuitive. NOT.
If I struggle with it, how on earth is my father, who is 70 soon, going to live with it? Well he isn't. He's self taught and I'm often surprised at the things he does on his own (installed Ubuntu without asking for any help +1 for Ubuntu the installer is that good), but Ribbons will floor him, for sure.
The Ribbon bar is about as a good a UI decision as Apple's single button mouse on the grounds that users aren't bright enough to understand multiple buttons. Doh!
Unfortunately, driving a car is relatively simple compared to what computer programs do. A car goes forwards and backwards (and there's no real UI to support backwards motion) for the most part, as it doesn't really turn so much as it goes forward at an angle, and it only has two modes of operation: stop, and go. So its UI is simple, and easy to get right.
On the other hand, designing an intuitive universal GUI that encompasses the needs of every program out there is very difficult. Every program has different needs, and a different usage pattern. Some are procedural. Some are functional. Some are visual. Simple isn't necessarily right in all instances.
I'm not defending the ribbon. But it's not to say that the current UI is the most intuitive either.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Someone said in another post that it is high time that Firefox was forked anywayz.
Only problem is, you can't, and the reason why is because in terms of complexity, a Web browser is one of those "Great Pyramid," or "Stonehenge," scale apps, similar to a kernel itself.
So as a result, only Godlike coders can even work collaboratively on a browser, and virtually nobody can start a truly new project of their own.
That tells me that HTTP itself needs reworking, or at least the way image rendering works. The textual protocol is simple enough, so I'm guessing it is mainly the image problem.
I guess that possibly also explains why Tim Berners-Lee didn't originally want images on the Web. It might have been because he figured that would make things too hard to implement. If that was his reasoning, it looks like he was right.
It might be more intuitive for younger people (who play too much Xbox), but it isn't necessarily the best tool for the job.
You're talking about it being intuitive for young people, and in the same breath you say it's not the best tool for the job. What you are complaining about is a steep learning curve, and that you are unwilling to invest the time to learn it since you work well enough (by your standards) with the tools you have already learned.
The best tool for the job is actually a compromise between the learning curve, how well and how fast you can get your job done with that particular tool. You can have any two. Microsoft and Mozilla are implicitly making an argument that the steeper learning curve will result in more productivity. They are (most likely) assuming that the average user has gotten used to the new UI, that computer users are more tech savvy than before and intelligent enough to make the leap to a new UI. Even though we are complainers here on /. I like to think we are also capable of adopting a UI concept that will ultimately result in better productivity.
And, by the way, I didn't like the ribbon in the beginning either.
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
Rather than splintering and moving to chrome/opera/safari et al, is it time to fork firefox?
This is something else I just thought of. Microsoft are going to destroy Linux. Matter of fact, they pretty much already have.
How? By conditioning the majority of the non-technical user population in terms of how to think.
The ideas in this don't get used for writing software any more, and 50 WoW gold says that I'll get a reply to this very post from a Windows refugee, calling me an idiot for even bringing that up.
Microsoft has made it so that unless Linux is a clone of Windows, Linux doesn't have a prayer, cos the users don't want anything else, and won't accept anything else. The UNIX philosophy was about how to design genuinely stable software that didn't just fall apart or turn to shit, but you can't write that any more, because like I said, nobody wants it now.
So as a result, Ubuntu has an interface that looks just like Windows, but crashes if someone gives it a hard look, just like Windows.
The idiot end users don't remember the fact that Linux's extra stability was what caused them to leave Windows in the first place. Ubuntu is so much like Windows now, that it also has Windows' problems. In the end the Windows refugees are going to wonder why they bothered switching, because Linux will be exactly the same; viruses everywhere, and it crashing all the time, etc.
The UNIX philosophy could have meant that things were different, and software was more stable. But nobody wants that; because it wouldn't be just like Windows.
So even though Microsoft probably are still going to die now themselves, when they go, they will take Linux down with them.
If that's really their primary argument against big government, then it just goes to show how they misunderstand the function of government and shouldn't be allowed within a mile of government offices.
I'm sorry, but you're quite wrong here. Previously used conventions are a major part of UI design, but abandoning old conventions for better ones is both a major and necessary risk at times. By your definition, how intuitive a system is depends entirely on the person using it, and the results of testing would have no objective value. The fact is that old Office menus were complete garbage, and we only liked them because we'd been using them for the better part of almost 2 decades.
I remember my heuristics professor once telling us how she was at CES one year and there was this black device at one of the booths. It just looked like a box, and had no buttons or anything, and she stood there for a while trying to figure out how to turn it on. It never occurred to her to just touch it. When she did, it immediately lit up and exposed interactive elements on it's surface.
Something being intuitive is not what you describe it to be. It is the ability of a system to be learned and adapted to quickly. Prior knowledge of other systems can either help or hinder this scenario, but the baseline is from the perspective of one who's never interacted with this sort of technology before. If you are accustomed to other systems for the same task, but which function differently, this will be an obvious hindrance as your mind subconsciously begins looking for the same conventions, which are notably lacking. The real measure of its worth is how long it takes to relearn how to use the new system.
I was personally hesitant to try it as well, and put it off for about two years, but found it surprisingly comfortable to use when I finally capitulated. Additionally, it's very obvious that the ribbon's real purpose is actually to provide a common interface for legacy, and potential future touch screen displays, with its use of large buttons and more area.
What if the Office ribbon crashes? Will it crash Firefox too? Vulnerabilities on the ribbon will percolate into Firefox.
The ribbon provides easy and intuitive means for accessing common features. It does so, however, that the expense of less used features. With a menu system a reasonably competent person should be able to navigate through each menu hierarchy in short order and find the function they need. The new UI design basically takes a linearly complex problems and changes it to an O2 complex problem. With the new paradigm of embedding capabilities in hot spots, people have to understand the back-end in order to effectively operate the front-end. An even more egregious abuse of this line of UI design is the new chart editor in Excel. A thesis could be written on on how clumsy things operate so I will not go into any details here.
-rd
Don't get me started with these bad car analogies. I'm still pissed about moving the high beam switch from the floor to a stupid stick on the steering column.
I keep getting my left foot caught in the steering wheel switching to low beams.
Have gnu, will travel.
Perhaps so, but in pretty much the entire world outside of North America and Australasia, a modern car is unlikely to have an automatic transmission.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
But I hope they won't do this to the Mac version of Firefox! What a stupid, ugly, rotten idea.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
looks like its time for me to switch to chrome
Haven't we had that argument a couple of times here already? Anyway : the reason you had trouble with it is not because it isn't intuitive, it's because you're very fluent with and accustomed to the old UI.
Don't think so, it violates quite a few basic rules of UI design. I know there are issues with the old 7+/-2 rule, but a higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of non-intuitive icons is hard to search, it takes more screen real-estate than necessary, and is hostile to touch typists who don't want to have to keep moving their hand from keyboard to mouse and back (Alt-F S has become Alt H F D F -- double the keystrokes).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Except that even once you're used to it, it still takes up a HUGE chunk (relatively) of vertical screen real estate which you can never get back. You know, the dimension that's becoming less and less available as the OEMs beat the "widescreen" drum because they can claim the same number of inches for less pixels?
On my install of firefox 2, I have the toolbar, menubar, *AND* address bar all stuck on the same line. It takes up 16 vertical pixels. The tab bar is another 16 pixels. This is a godsend on tiny screened devices. Yes, I may be able to hide the ribbon, but it's not very useful when it's hidden, is it? It adds another click to *everything* that simply does not need to be there. Used to be, in Word, I could cram all of the functions I use often (including "hide spelling/grammer errors") onto one toolbar. One toolbar which would fit next to the menubar on most screens. The other functions were there under the menus if I needed them. Can I do that now? (Maybe I can--if the ribbon can be reduced to ~16 or so pixels tall while still giving one-click access to functions, then maybe it's less of an abortion than I've given it credit for.)
I can't understand why vertical screen space is treated like it's free and unlimited when really it is becoming more precious with time.
>>>currency here in the UK that until 1971 was a total headfuck.
No offense but that really doesn't seem too difficult. A pound is divided into 20 shillings. That's equivalent to our system where one dollar is divided into 20 nickles. It's also how many digits a human being has.
Sub-dividing the shilling (or nickle) into 12 pieces is consistent with the idea of dividing a dozen into 12 units, although probably too small to be of any use today.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
*Stares at calender, hoping it's April 1st*. Then again, I guess this sort of thing is to be expected, with them adding things like the Awful Bar
Watch it. This was created to solve real, serious usability problems. If you donâ(TM)t like it, provide your own solutions. Lists of hierarchical menus is not a good solution.
That said, the title of this story is completely misleading. If you read the quote, the idea is not to use the Ribbon in Firefox, but to use something less menu-driven, similar to the Ribbon.
Newish stuff in a car controls are: A/C, remote mirrors, remote windows, remote doors, GPS, in hybrid displays that show which drive system is in use, etc.
They are NOT using the ribbon, they're using two buttons like in Chrome. The direction they're going is actually very interesting, and I suggest you read up on it yourself. These two buttons just set the stage for some cooler stuff in 4.0.
>>>Most people who actually give the ribbon a chance get used to it in about 2 weeks -
Wow. 2 weeks of my life wasted so I could save 1/4 second selecting my command. Yeah. Benjamin Franklin had a saying about that - "Penny wise; pound foolish," to describe people who count pennies but spend dollars recklessly.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
My biggest problem with the system is the strict use of pictorial representations of functions. I don't know what "Properties" or "Insert" or "Cross Reference" is supposed to look like. Nor would anyone be able to describe to me how to find them since they would be describing a tiny icon picture which I would then have to interpret instead of using a single word explanatory statement.
Have you even used Office 2007 or are you just nuts? Everything is labeled! There's no more guess-work involved in determining what functions do than there was in previous Office versions. Besides, everything has a nice tooltip associated with it that includes a purpose and a keyboard shortcut (if applicable).
How to insert a cross-reference, which is a hyperlink by default: Insert [tab] --> Links [group] --> Cross-reference, or you can do it through References [tab] --> Captions [group] --> Cross-reference, or throw that bad boy on the Quick Access toolbar.
Dear Timothy, You should try rummaging through some /.ers' trash, you might get lucky and inherit a real computer for you to complain about...
Regards,
Linux
Since users of the Mac (2008) version of Office didn't have to put up with the Ribbon abortion, can we please exempt the Mac version of Firefox (and hopefully related browsers like the Mac-only Camino) from this big mistake?
I do have Office 2007, and I've noticed that certain ribbon tabs only pop up when the appropriate task is performed. For example, a tab with stuff related to tables only comes up when Word notices that a table is your active selection.
(This tab comes up in addition to the "standard" ribbon )
You mean something like that? Firefox figures out you're torrenting, and puts up a ribbon tab with torrent-related command buttons?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Hmm, the Office Button seems a heckuva lot like a File menu to me.
Maybe more of a hybrid approach *is* possible.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Down with the ribbon! Down with the ribbon! Down with the ribbon!
What a useless piece of non-standard bullshit!
Why the fuck need open source software copy every proprietary software moves, how ever crappy they are ? Haven't they yet figured out that they can do better on their own ?
LOL. I didn't say you had to spend a full two weeks dedicated to learning the new interface. I meant that people generally become acclimated to the new interface during their first two weeks using the application in their normal way. Who knows how much time they actually spend hunting for their normally used commands, but I found it didn't take me very long at all. But hey - that's the wonderful thing about computers. If you don't like the way Mozilla's doing it - you can write your own frigging browser. Keep railing against progress. Let me know how it works out for you. Still using those keycards, cuz you didn't want to learn typing and the cards worked just fine?
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
... etc... WTF is wrong with that? When has it ever made sense to translate what could be done in one click and one motion to two clicks and two motions? Office 07 annoys the hell out of me and I only tolerate it at work. I do have OO installed, but there are many times where I must endure that damned interface because I can't figure out how to turn it off.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Looks like its time to install Vimperator http://vimperator.mozdev.org/ again
Microsoft's flagship product the operating system "Windows" will yet again reach new lows in sucky UIs. Firefox and others to follow suit. Mozilla spokesperson has stated: "We will not be outdone by neither Windows nor Internet Explorer. We promise to bring you a product that surely will eclipse anything Microsoft has ever produced and bring more suck to the world, open source style!".
On a more somber note. Mozilla, stop following Microsoft and do what you originally did with Firefox, outdo them. Seriously can't be that hard, honestly.
I am not a fan of the ribbons either. They seem to complicate things unnecessarily. Change != Progress, Differenent Better
Never has the concept of the facepalm applied so well...
Why would you even go there ffx.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
I feel the exact same way. I have XP running in VirtualBox so I can use Office for school. I was a little confused with the ribbon initially since it looks so foreign, but after using it to write a simple 3 page paper I love it. It really is very intuitive once you play with it. Not only that, but unlike a few other free office suites, I don't feel like I'm wrestling with the damned thing. I can just sit down and start writing (after booting up XP in VirtualBox, of course, but still).
:)
Also, as you pointed out, some of the more intermediate features that I never really used or understood before are more prominent, and actually more useful.
It wasn't a perfect transition. It took me a few minutes to figure out how the new single/double spacing is implemented, and I'm sure lots of people will point to that as proof that the new interface blows. Oh well.
Of course, I might just be feeling adventurous having just upgraded to Slackware 13 and spending the last few weeks figuring out KDE4
Well, it seems tha normal users don't need file, formating and printing operations that much, sice they are on quite different places, and printing is well hidden on that namles tab outside the tabs line, where used to be a useless window menu.
Yeah, that is right, MS throwed a lot of intermediate functions on the face of the user. Using pictures, instead of words to describe what those intermediate functions do help a lot, adding to the confusion and forcing users to pass the mouse over every place every time he'll do any non-usual thing.
They didn't break that, but almost completely hide advanced options within tabs that disapear depending on context and that huge badly categorized list of options at the non-alignet tab.
But none of those problems are intrisical to the ribon, they are problems of MS Office. The only intrisical problem I see with the ribon is the lost of vertical area that a previous poster already commented.
Rethinking email
Maybe it's becoming time to switch to lynx now. I don't like those screen-space eating ribbon-bar thingies. Priority should lie with the content and functionality not with the fancy stuff around it. Just look at the popularity of vlc and media-player-classic as media players. They just work and not with all the bloat of the fancy skinnable new-fangled Windows Media Player. And why would I be interrested in a windows look-alike browser on my linux system?
The current interface presents a nice CLEAN list of commands, which can be quickly and easily scanned. The new ribbon interface presents a confusing mess of pictures and words that make a "quick scan" very difficult.
Yeah, but there's a trade off here. In the old office menu system, you'd often find what you're looking for buried in a menu somewhere with a half-assed dialog box to go along with it. Sure, you could scan each menu every time fairly quickly, and it was easy on the eyes. But once you found what you were looking for, repeating the path there really sucked.
One thing the new system does get right is that everything now has a keyboard short cut and everything is supposedly quicker to get to with less mouse acrobatics. The only reason you're used to the menu system is you've been trained since windows 95 to get good at navigating menus so you don't notice anymore.
I'm sure if you took two people, started one up with a ribbon, started the other with a menu, and then switched them after about a year, they'd both immediately complain. But that's obvious. The real question is after a month or so of training and learning, who will be performing better and is that performance change (if any) worth it?
Haven't we had that argument a couple of times here already? Anyway : the reason you had trouble with it is not because it isn't intuitive, it's because you're very fluent with and accustomed to the old UI.
You state that as if the argument was settled, and your opinion was accepted as correct. It hasn't been, and it isn't clear you're actually right. Not all interfaces are equally valid.
Anyone else notice that outlook and publisher did not get the ribbon interface?
I suspect that Outlook has a very strong internal UI design group and bend to the Word / Excel camp only grudgingly.
I am indeed making this up, of course, I have no special insight. But I do remember the build up from the original Exchange mail client to Outlook, and how they had new and very specific GUI expertise on the job. Just seems the sort of thing that could be easily entrenched in an organisation. TWAGAS.
Oh, and what the heck is Publisher all about? Does anybody actually use that thing? Did they get the developers when they bought the code? Didn't think so...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
2 weeks of unproductive time * #employees in company = $$$$$, and for for what exactly? Do you think any minor efficiency gains will overcome the 2 weeks of lost productivity over the normal deployment time of Office 2007?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This would not be a problem if a ribbon search function were also included. If typing in a ribbon search box revealed a list of command items, which if clicked reveals the location of the icon picture then describing how to get to a command would be no problem at all.
It's also difficult to describe to another person on the phone. That can matter because some of us poor suckers have to provide telephone tech support to people and stuff.
At least with a classic text menu you can say, "See the menu bar? Now click on File, then Print, etc.." Its a whole lot easier with words up there.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
<sarcasm>Yes, I'm sure that's what he meant. You have to spend 336 hours straight studying the Office ribbon before you can use it correctly.</sarcasm>
His point (which I agree with), is that all things being equal, the ribbon is a better interface than the file menu. Of course all things are not equal. You've been practicing on that clunky "Word for Windows" file menu for 15 years. It may take you a little time to retrain yourself. People like myself, on the other hand, don't use Office regularly, and find the new interface much easier to use.
Microsoft is taking a calculated risk to separate themselves from their competitors. I think it was a good decision.
My biggest gripe with the "ribbon" is that, in MSOffice at least, it completely removes custom toolbars. My Office 2003 at work is heavily customised with many custom toolbars. I can see every button I need for formatting, printing, macros, editing, referencing etc. in just three compact toolbars. All the icons I need are present all the time, in the same amount of space it takes for just one "ribbon" tab. There is only one toolbar which can be modified in Office 2003 - the quick toolbar at the top, which is not sufficient for my needs.
The ribbon removes functionality for power users. I wouldn't have a problem with it if Microsoft implemented a way to fully customise it (w/o using scripting), and gave power users the option to turn it off!
Not all change not initiated by me is bad. The ribbon however is bad for me.
I am not sure how intuitive or usable the old office is, but I have been using one version or another since the late 80s. I am very familiar with it and can access anything relatively quickly with little forethought. My company switched to Office 2007 and I am miserable. I use to know where everything is, but now it takes multiple clicks to get what I want done. Maybe I will get used to, I'll probably have to, but one of the key benefits for me was the model that was used. I knew that in any program I went to, if I wanted to open a document, I should go under File and I would see the open command. Whatever happens, I just hope that all the different vendors stick to a consistent model so that people will still be able to transfer knowledge of how one program works to how another works. Another bad move I thought was the new interface by Adobe, I am not liking the new Elements interface.
Seriously???? April fools day already...
Hey! Monkey Island was and still is fun. Office 2007 is not. :P
Ezekiel 23:20
Change for the sake of change is what they've been doing with the UI for years now. Every new version means I have to go on a hunt for the fixes to undo the 'improvements'. Why the hell can't they leave the damn UI alone and fix the crap that's actually broken?
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Just what Firefox needs; a context-switching toolbar when the one context that's needed is web browsing!
Seriously though, if I had any say in the matter, I'd vote donotwant. It's unnecessary with the stock toolbar; I always want back, forward, home, stop, new tab, location, and search to be visible regardless of what might be displaying in the browser. I do not want to have to go digging for those. Also, I especially want the menubar to always, always, always display. I like English labels on features, not pictographs done by a non-artistic, nearly-autistic developer.
Now, when it comes to third-party toolbars it might make some sense, but again: I want the google toolbar to always be visible (I use google's bookmark feature rather than the browser's), and when I have the web developer toolbar enabled, I always want it visible, not buried somewhere.
Whenever I have to work at a Windows system and use MSIE, the first thing I do is hit alt, go into the options and turn the menus back on. Ditto for Windows Explorer.
The ribbon interface in Firefox is one of those things where it's not necessary; developers are doing it "because we can" and because it is always more fun to develop new features than it is to fix architectural issues. (Well, not always - I generally liked to dive in and track down difficult-to-reproduce-and-debug defects)
If you MUST put in a ribbon, at least make it optional. Disabling that shit will be the first thing I do when I deploy Firefox.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I didn't see the size of government shrink when G W was in office.
/sigh
/.'ers hate the menus because MS created them. If Torvalds has build the new menu system as the default Linux interface, you guys would be creaming your pants over them.
Another literal interpretation simply for the sake of hating on change. Do you really think I meant that each user has to spend 80 hours learning the menu? No - I meant each user acclimates over the course of roughly 2 weeks or otherwise normal application usage. Real-time lost? Who knows, minutes?
How many functions in the application do you regularly use? 10? 20? Crap, if it takes you 80 hours to learn where 20 functions are, even if they were hidden down 400 menus deep, then I'd have to question your cognitive abilities and wonder whether you should actually be using a computer in the first place.
I think this most
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
I don't need my browser taking up valuable screen space to display a @#$%^&* stupid ribbon. Anyone have a suggestion for a browser that is more interested in displaying web pages properly without add #$%^& eye-candy?
The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth. (Stonewall Jackson
You forget the guinea.
That is all.
I'm really surprised that the Slashdot crowd has so much trouble with the ribbon. I'm an IT consultant and across all the people I've deployed Office 2007 to, not one has had more then a handful of questions and zero complaints (at least with regard to the ribbon). Many people actively sought a budget to get 2007 after seeing someone else use it, I never pushed it on anyone. On top of that, people are using styles instead of hand formatting everything, creating locked forms and templates (and editing them later without calling me for help) and using all sorts of feature, sometimes asking me about features I had never used. I've been using it so long, it's far more jarring to try to go back then the transition ever was. Plus auto-hiding the ribbon works great on notebooks / netbooks. Of course, I don't see how it will work in a web browser, but I guess we will see.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Sure, let's pick the most universally loathed MS Office feature since Clippit and introduce it to a web browser because, umm, it's more "modern". Gah.
I'm not even going to bother arguing for the ability to turn this nonsense the heck off. If they actually implement it, I'm just going to figure the Firefox team has completely lost their way, and I'll switch to another browser entirely, on every computer I administer, both in my household and at work.
I don't know yet which one I'll go with. But I know it won't be any trouble at all finding one whose dev team has better sense than to immitate the Office 97 ribbon interface.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Mozilla focuses on Windows development and completely ignores Linux.
Do we see a GTK+ version of Firefox coming? I didn't think so.
Well, I gave the ribbon a chance for 10 weeks and never found it to be better than the old interface. Menus are small, unobtrusive, and arranged in hierarchical manner that helps me find the option or tool I want.
The ribbon instead presents tiny pictures I that often aren't clear as to what they mean, and can't possibly hold as much as a menu. So you end up leaving things off the ribbon, which makes them even harder to find.
Not all change is good, especially not change just for the sake of change. The ribbon is a change just to change things, and it is a step backward.
True. However, if you want to walk someone through the new interface over the phone, it SUCKS.
I don't even USE the menus in my browser. (Much.) Buttons? Sure. "View -> Source"? Yeah. And the occasional trip to "Preferences/Options." Oh yeah, and "History." Everything else falls into the category of "set once and forget forever."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I've been moaning about office 2007/ vista/ ubuntu interfaces for fucking ages and everyone i know agrees with me. Words are easier to understand than some stupid fucking large hieroglyphics. Please don't do this.
Well, so much for Firefox. I had Office 2007 installed for almost a full day before I pulled it an put the box on the shelf; with this, I'll at least know not to even try. NO RIBBON. PLEASE.
They just don't mix. People hate change and will resist it at all costs, even if it is something that, if given a chance, they would like.
It appears that Mozilla wants to swap out a standard, stable, well organised and well known cross-platform GUI with one that requires more CPU effort, is confusing and inconsistent.
Personally, I thought that Mozilla had more common sense than to use the MS Office Ribbon, and I don't consider the Mozilla GUI to be out of date, and neither does it look out of date. It just doesn't look like MS Office - and that fact is a good thing!
Same as with any other tool, it's not inherently bad. How it's been used so far, however, is downright awful. I DARE you to justify why the "Find" option is available only on the "Format Text" Ribbon in Outlook.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Who? Who does not want to wear the ribbon?
Uh, hehe 20 functions, how cute. No, my users unfortunately run large parts of the business on Excel spreadsheets. We're doing all we can to get away from that (we'll be up to 5 reporting tools by years end) but it's our reality. They have tons of linked spreadsheets with each spreadsheet being 10-50 tabs and many of them pulling from 1-3 ODBC databases or using 3rd party addons to pull information from databases. There are power Excel users and then there are guru's and for better or worse all of our top financial guys and gals are level 10 Excel guru's so I don't think I'll be springing Office 2007 on them any time soon (not to mention 2/3rds the addons we use aren't available/certified on 2007).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
However it is nowhere near as good as keyboard shortcuts when you get used to those, and casual users don't use those either. Having to hunt about each time you want to use one of these applications is annoying. Having to help many secretarial staff with a two day memory retention period is even more annoying - there are far too many MS Windows users that do not think of using the "Start" menu let alone ribbons. If it's not on their screen for them to see it becomes a computer support issue. I think that's why there is so much ill feeling here - the MS Office interface from the early 1990s has finally changed radically and a pile of people are hassling readers here for help who are happier with OpenOffice anyway. I'm not going to be using it much so two weeks might add up to a year in real time, and two weeks of bitching and calling up for hand holding for every secretarial staff member will be a huge waste of time. It's the "listen to stupid story about typing a letter to grandchildren for 15 minutes and solve the actual problem in 2 seconds" situation. The only real answer is to motivate somebody in such a group to get off their backside and learn about the new system (eg. agree to go to training or actually read the docs), get good at it and agree to be a resource to show the others what to do. However you'll still have a week or two where nearly no work is done because they will all be bitching to each other about the interface change instead of actually using it to get used to it.
Meanwhile, every *nix networking guy is expected to find stuff for them instantly despite never seeing this interface before, hence annoyed readers here.
Hey, can us 'old timers' keep our old, ancient, (straight forward) browser interface? If the same mindset goes to other fields, I'm sure its going to be just as much fun to move the gas, gear shift, brake pedal, turn signal, radio, to different parts of the car each year they come out! Because we have so little to do these days, its fun to relearn the same stuff over and over!
Actually it has changed. Neither you or I would have much luck getting a model T Ford moving. Yes it has a steering wheel but the entire transmission and breaking system was completely different. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Transmission_and_drivetrain note the lack on an accelerator. Your only speed control in the thing was slow and fast!
read my mind at http://the-willows.blogspot.com/
When I right click on a word I expect certain things no matter where I right click. Copy, Paste, Spell Check, select all etc... Yes I use a lot of short cut keys but still, I love the fact that you can just right click and get a menu. Well, I may hate Ribbons now, but our younger generation will highlight something or click something and just expect certain options to allways be there. Why go WAY up to the top to change font size when I can barley move my mouse and change it with ribbon style?
Mark
Dude, car "interfaces" haven't changed very much in the last 100 years. It's still a wheel that you turn left and right, gas on the right, brake on the left, etc. If that modern car happened to be a stick shift he wouldn't have any trouble changing gears because they're essentially the same. It seems to me that the changes have been to make the cars work better or to add new features - not just because one year someone thought it would look more modern to put the shifter on the left and turn the steering wheel into a joystick. In fact they've proposed cars that you steer with a joystick and I think even you would have to admit that they haven't caught on.
Yes, please, for the love of FSM, update and modernize software and make any necessary changes. However, if the only reason you can give for moving everything around is because it looks cool, then I feel justified in saying that I prefer the old version. So pardon my bitching.
Incidentally, the new MS interface looks like something from a Mac got stuck in a blender and it works about as well. I still say it sucks even when not comparing it to the "old" interfaces.
Yay!
Now, can we start porting FF extensions to webkit like, yesterday, please?
- Dan
The ribbon actually IS a much better menu system once you get used to it. All the normal things that most users generally use are pretty easy to find, and many of the mid-level and intermediate things they weren't already aware of are presented more easily.
If a UI isn't immediately perceived as more functional and accessible, then it has already failed over the previous version. Saying it is better "once you get used to it" is just bullshit to cover how terrible it is because you can "get used to" any crappy UI so long as the functions you need are still there somewhere.The real test of a UI is throwing a random person in front of it and watching how effective they are without any prior knowledge on the UI itself.
Agreed. I think that regardless of which interface is used for an app, the most important thing is making sure that the categories are unambiguous, so that the first category someone chooses to look at is the right one. Also, it's not like they would completely stop supporting the classic UI, so there is little to complain about. Assuming they go through with this, and not just in their Windows releases, I'd look forward to having the choice of trying the ribbon UI on an application I actually use. I resent Microsoft at least as much as the next guy here, but the ribbon UI is merely a new idea - it shouldn't matter where it came from, unless they've patented it.
Actually, menu bars being already in the system is a legitimate complaint. It's obvious when a program was not written natively for Mac because it doesn't utilize the integrated menu bar system. If Firefox introduces a ribbon menu for all releases, there will be a backlash from Mac users who just want the old classic interface back. I have no idea what the hell he's complaining about with Aqua/Aero though...
Stop right there.
I currently have three 'office' products I use on a daily basis. Work has "Office 2003", at home I have Openoffice and "Office 2007" (bundled with the laptop, along with Vista. Don't say it, I know)
Due to current circumstances I am still using the laptop with Vista and OOO / Office 2007.
Your statement was: See, I get it for Microsoft Office. Its alot user intuitive for users to find the save and print and formating buttons with the ribbon system
I disagree.
I seriously disagree.
Using the ribbon made my lift miserable for some time, and still does. I current deal with the problem by only using a very limited number of features and not doing any that I don't know how to do already.
Let's take File and Print. Funny you should mention this one. At work I do not have a problem. I am required to open, save, print regularly. I do not have a problem finding where things are, and if I have been there before for a particular option then I can determine how to proceed.
I still have issues saving documents in office 2007. It is frustrating. There are some things that are nice about The Ribbon and other changes, but overall I feel more frustrated and annoyed than anything.
I agree that users don't like change. I agree that users generally take time to learn new ways and means.
My eyesight is failing. Soon I won't be able to use a computer without glasses. The ribbon does not help. Right now I can call up the menu and pick out from the list the shapes of words, location - statically and relative, and generally find and use Office features. Every time I look at the office 2007 ribbon I find my sight glazing over. I read it to see what is there, see if the buttons are the same as last time. I have difficulty holding 5+ 'pictures' in my mind of the main tabs, and I simply can't recall the tabs and the many buttons on them. Help?
I know the main functions under the main menus. I don't need to remember what the main headings are in Word - I know which one I need now and it's approximate location. I can see the ALT- shortcut for what I want.
On the flip side of the coin, up until a few years back I was a regular Photoshop / Gimp user. Recently I had to rework lots of images for documentation. I used Paint (no, really, the XP version of Paint is quite good..), Gimp and Photoshop. I don't have a problem with the photoshop/paint/gimp sidebar of images. I know the meanings, I know the locations and if I need something else or something new or specific then I can get the functionality from the menu bar.
I hope that programs don't all end up like Office. Perhaps one day I will get used to the hunt and peck. For now I like knowing the location of commands. I am probably jaded in my first bad experience: I needed to see the outline of a table in Office 2000 Word. I couldn't find it. Nowhere in the ribbon was this option. After much futile searching, frustration and rage I calmed down and googled it. Right. Found it. NO! NOT THERE! IT DOES NOT EXIST!!!! Then, below the screenshot on the helpful page it said - "NOTE: THIS OPTION ONLY APPEARS IF YOU HAVE SELECTED A TABLE". *sigh*. So, I clicked on the table (I hadn't noticed that it wasn't selected) and went through the ribbon, and there it was: The Option. *sigh*
>>by holding the Alt key.
Crap. That's gonna suck. I hope somebody comes up with a type of "Alt-CapsLock" key to free up our fingers.
I dislike the ribbon interface because I find that the many actions take 1 to 3 more mouse clicks compare to the classic office interface.
I tried the change. I don't think it is an improvement.
I see this move to the MS Office "ribbon" style as a big negative for FF. I'm not totally against it, especially if they can make it less intrusive than the "ribbon" in MS Office '07, but I'm not a fan of this at all right now. Until I see more of how they plan to integrate this feature, I'm saying no thanks. I'll switch to another browser before I use the intrusive "ribbons."
I currently use Chrome and FF interchangeably for this reason. FF is extensible while Chrome is not yet fully extensible, but Chrome is very unintrusive in it's layout. Not taking into effect the speeds and security of these browsers in comparison to others.
I'm not a real heavy user of any office productivity software as I don't have a great need for them at this time. I do very strongly dislike the "ribbon" in MS Office. It takes up so much space that is unnecessary. With the menu's you had small icons representing a task and it took up a lot less space. These "ribbons" don't get any ribbons in my book.
I realize you can minimize them, but who wants to click on the menu just to open it and then have it disappear every time you do a task? I've tried using MS Office 2007 with the "ribbons" and I can't stand the space they take up. I still have to learn them for support, but I myself will not use it unless I have to. Even though OOo is not the greatest software available for office productivity because of it's sluggish performance, it is still menu-driven and maintains the customizability needed to maximize the real-estate.
... look at the United States and its reasons for not switching to the (clearly superior) metric system.
Actually, as many historians have pointed out, the US has been "metric" for more than a century now. All the American "Imperial" units of measurement are legally defined in terms of ISO units. Thus, the inch is 2.54 cm because that's the legal definition of the inch. And if you look at the labels on most American goods, you'll find that they include the metric size (weight, volume) of the contents, along with the Imperial size.
I've seen it described as an "extended metric" system, in the same sense that much American industry and marketing uses the term "extended". We have not just meters, centimeters, millimeters, kilometers, etc.; we also have inches, feet, yards, miles, which are also defined as some multiple of a meter. We have all the power-of-ten prefixes, and we also have other really weird multiples for the people who prefer those. So our system is obviously better, right? After all, people who know only metric terms can't easily tell you the length of a(n American) football field, but those who know the additional "yards" unit can.
The problem isn't that the US hasn't "gone metric"; it's that people refuse to stop using the old terms and switch to the metric terms. But hey, we have Free Speech here; the government can't force us to stop talking about inches and feet and force us to talk about meters. That's good, right?
Well, at least it's good for the marketers, who can present us with a confused mess of bizarre units, and make it very difficult for us to compare prices of goods. Take a good look at the price/unit labels in most grocery stores, if you don't know what I mean.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
LMAO...what a laughable bunch of boggy snot! There has never been a less intuitive and more valuable-screen-real-estate-robbing and memory-thieving interface in the history of gui computing (even more important when one is surfing the web, especially on small-screen small-resource netbooks. It was bad when Microsoft did it. It is even worse in a browser when most users seldom use menu commands anyway. Who cares about aero-glass special effects anyway? No future donations from me to Moz (or any other developer) if they attempt to take this on. If they do take it on then at least have the courtesy to keep it exclusively on the Windows platform.
you want to have this ribbon thing, FINE, but make it optional, don't take away my familiar interface, it won't cost you anything
I've been running Office 2007 for well over a year now. Just today I UPGRADED to Office 2003. Even after a year, I was still looking for stuff.
Don't get me started with these bad car analogies. I'm still pissed about moving the high beam switch from the floor to a stupid stick on the steering column.
I keep getting my left foot caught in the steering wheel switching to low beams.
If I recall correctly from my Marine Corps days, the high/low beam switch is mounted on the floor in a HMMWV. Not sure about the consumer models (Arnold Schwarzenegger type, not the refrigerator-on-wheels).
but you get points for "fellatious". That was clever. Personally, I find all worship to be so. (And I don't mean clever.)
> One thing the new system does get right is that everything now has a keyboard short cut and everything is supposedly quicker to get to with less mouse acrobatics.
> The real question is after a month or so of training and learning, who will be performing better and is that performance change (if any) worth it?
The one who is using the keyboard shortcuts.
Conclusion switching to the ribbon is a waste of time. Adding keyboard shortcuts and documenting them would be better.
Lots of companies like to target their UI for naive users. Very few create UIs for users who will be skilled - except for stuff like games - there are games which allow skilled users to do very many "actions per second".
The tired myth that the metric system is somehow "superior" because it is base ten is even more ridiculous on a forum dominated by people who are used to working bases other ten.
The metric system is not one system of measurement, but a whole bunch of systems just as arbitrary as most other systems of measurement. Some of the measurements work out to numbers that are good for some scientific work, others may work out for numbers that are convenient for everyday use. Clearly not all of them work out. The idiots who decided that pure water's boiling and freezing points were the only possible definition points of the temperature scale are even worse than the people who decided that the Office 2007 ribbon design was better than a toolbar.
I can live with some aspects of the metric system, but to call it superior when I'm constantly having to use strange numbers to get around its weaknesses (especially in cooking, who wants to deal with 1.25ml of oregano, and 0.625ml of freshly ground black pepper. And people claim the US system is messed up) is just silly.
What makes a system superior has nothing to do with does the system evenly divide into ten.
I've been using Office 2007 for the past six to nine months or so, maybe more. I use it at least weekly in Word and PowerPoint. (My job only rarely touches Excel, so I can't speak much of how that felt to me before the new version).
The biggest impact I've seen is that about the only way for me to use the new versions of the application is to full screen the window. Used to be, I'd have an app like Word carefully sized and I could readily see the edges of other apps that I was referring back to. Now, I no longer feel like that is a realistic option. Instead, I'm forced to locate other utilities to do rapid window switching. It feels more awkward for me, more clumsy when I'm having to refer back and forth (a common task for me).
Some options that I use readily I find very difficult to locate. It took a tremendously long time to find "Track Changes", because the lack of words on many of the icons means I can't just scan down a menu. The placement also makes it difficult to know you are reviewing each option on a given ribbon. I ended up passing the actual location four times before I finally found it, and that was with the help tool telling me roughly where to look.
In PowerPoint, I find it less bothersome. Maybe it was better designed there. Maybe just the nature of the tool makes it more amenable to the approach.
The best comparison I can think of would be if the command line were stripped away, you had to do everything with a GUI. Could I live with it as a routine user of most apps? Yes. Would it be comfortable for me to handle some tasks I do now? No.
I just don't understand what "ribbons" are in the first place, not being an MS programmer, and not having a new version of Office anywhere except on a Mac (where you can't avoid a menu bar).
From what I can tell from screenshots though, there look like nothing more than the old fashioned "toolbars". Lots of tiny icons arranged in a strip across the top; though updated a bit to have varying size and maybe a drop-down menu attached to some of them. I don't think many people found the old Microsoft way of cramming as much as possible into toolbars with unintelligible icons very helpful, especially when you've got 3 or 4 toolbars stacked all.
The standard way I figure out how to use an unfamiliar program (like all of Office) is to look through the menus, even looking at the grayed out items. Without that, the program is going to just be baffling.
The mock ups on the mozilla site show some very good usability ideas. Fitt's Law for the expanded window among them.
Buttons vs menus has seemed to mirror a mandatory trade-off between novice approachability and expert speed. I saw this in practice when I had to develop an Excel "data base" for my sister when I had not used Excel in years - living as I do in Linux. The buttons instead of menus seemed a bad solution in favor of the novice. Yet over 3 hours I found it was well organized and provided all the same functionality. Understanding that 3 hours is very far from expert. Yet as on old XEmacs user I think I can speak for what would have worked as an expert. Hot keys and 'show a menu' buttons can still be there.
Screen real estate is valuable particularly on the new netbooks. Moving the tabs into the top title area is slick. Allowing the controls to be with the affected page uses fewer cognitive brain cycles. Showing the 'will go to address' in the location bar preserves that vital (security) information at low cost.
As far as being "not standard". Your browser is not some minor app that is used infrequently. If I can learn to use Excel's ribbon in 3 hours while developing something, I think most people should be able to deal with it. Or find the "do the old thing" setting.
I studied UI a bit and had classes with Don Norman before he went to Apple. Firefox, great ideas, please do this.
Michael
10 years as a professional developer.
(really ancient \. number, from the slakware on floppies days, but no idea where it is.)
(Maybe I can--if the ribbon can be reduced to ~16 or so pixels tall while still giving one-click access to functions, then maybe it's less of an abortion than I've given it credit for.)
Yes you can. Right click on the space next to the ribbon bar tabs, or left click on the stupid looking down arrow thing on the title bar (just to the right of the strange little button bar thing with the save icon and forward/back icons).
Then click on "Minimize the Ribbon." Now it acts almost like a normal menu bar, except you get the full ribbon until you choose an action. Then it hides again.
The only annoying thing is that if you hover over the other tabs it won't switch to that tab like most menus will. You have to actually click on the tab to change to that tab's ribbon.
Fuck you, Mozilla. All I want is a simple fucking browser that does its damn job and does it well. That's what Firefox used to be. Now it's a bloated piece of shit that randomly freezes for seconds (or even minutes) at a time, randomly crashes due to shit design (Flash should NOT be allowed to crash the fucking browser!), ignores commands I give it (such as "STOP LOADING THE FUCKING PAGE"), loads pages slower than every other browser on the planet, goes to hell in a handbasket and refuses to save my tabs whenever I make the mistake of upgrading the browser while it's still running, and swallows every byte of free memory it can wrap its claws around. It's fucking garbage. And now, instead of concentrating all effort on fixing these horrendous flaws, the clueless fools at Mozilla want to turn their attention to wrecking the UI instead? These people should be lined up against the wall and shot.
That's it. I'm done with Firefox. I'll never recommend it to anyone ever again. Take this pile of shit you call a "browser" and shove it up your ass, Mozilla. I'm switching to something else, ANYTHING else.
... to choke the dumb-ass designer who designed that UI horror.
Actually, it's more like they took the car design, and changed the simple operations to make them terribly convoluted.
E.g. OLD: File>Save; OLD: "Turn key to turn off engine"
New: open hidden control panel compartment. Find lots of buttons.
Hunt for "Vehicle control" button. Press button, a second compartment opens.
Hunt for "Engine control" button. Press button, a third compartment opens.
Hunt through a few hundred buttons for the "turn off car" button.
It's not just that the UI is different, it's also that it's poorly organized, a lot more complicated to navigate than the old UI.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. The ribbon menu simply buries everything a level deeper but that isn't the big problem.
The big problem is that every other program on the windows platform uses the File, Edit, View, etc design. This was wonderful and a big advantage for windows over other platforms. Once you learned the system you could pick up a new program and fairly effortlessly find all the commands and learn to use the program. By using a consistent interface it brought a level of intuitiveness to every program that conformed.
With the ribbon interface, there is no uniformity. There is no commonality you can fall back on with a new program using this interface. Each app is going to be different.
The ribbon is horrible for phone support. Before, I could say "click Edit, click Paste", and the user would know exactly what I mean. Now, I have to say "click the icon that looks like...". Not to mention the fact that emailed instructions now need to include all sorts of graphics instead of just plain text. In short, ribbons are a suppiort nightmare.
Dont be anom..that was insightful. I used those too before I upgraded to 2007 for several of the other new features I wanted.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The driving interface is quite possibly the best user interface I know of, because the basic design hasn't changed since the days of the horseless carriage.
Buddy you don't know what you're talking about. I bet you won't be able to drive the first mass produced car, the T Ford. Without instructions you most likely would be killed at your first attempt.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
that's all.
So, the metric system sucks because... some people do a shoddy job when translating recipes into milliliters? Because whenever you see more than a single decimal digit, that is the case. Because God didn't actually ordain that food tastes better when produced with ingredients measuring an even number of "cups" or "pinches" or whatever system you find superior.
-
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
This is the beauty of oss. If you can't do it yourself then someone will come to your rescue...
This move to add a ribbon doesn't actually matter. Last time I checked, Firefox was written with a free software license. So if everyone hates the new ribbon, there's always the forking option. We can just modify the program to not have a ribbon. Problem solved.
So European and Asian cars don't count as modern? Not everyone in the world drives automatics, you know ;)
"The fact is that old Office menus were complete garbage, and we only liked them because we'd been using them for the better part of almost 2 decades."
I'm sorry, but that is called "begging the question". You haven't proved anything to me - the old Office menus certainly were quite disorganized, and could definitely have been improved, but this doesn't mean that the menu system had no value.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I already hate the Ribbon in Outlook2007 as it takes waaaaay too much space, and for me it doesn't get me things done faster as with a regular menu/buttonbar. So I definitly hope it will be optional when they implement it as ribbons are one of the most stupid UI 'enhancements' ever.
The typical human being can only process approximately 7 menu items at a time, plus or minus 2. The toolbars would be something you skim to find what you're looking for, and we all just memorized the various dropdown menus over the years. The new system simplifies this immensely, and groups them by functional similarity. As well as replacing full menus with quick selection boxes, like the margins selector in Word. Clicking on it displays about 5 common margin defaults, and a "custom" option. This is better design, as the number of people who'll need to use non-standard margins is minuscule. These, and other similar changes, are a part of a much improved design, and does help you make common layout changes faster, organizes it better psychologically, etc. This is especially better for novice users as it prevents information overload.
There are other specifics but I don't feel like going into them at 3:30AM right now. Does that answer your question?
What with Gnome scrapping their very usable desktop in favour of some visually fun but less practical eye candy, and Firefox introducing the ribbon, KDE already gone down the road of fashion statements rather than usability... when will the software teams realise that the whole reason for using Linux/Gnome/Firefox/KDE etc. is to get away from this windows style nonsense. I want a desktop where I know exactly where to go to get the menu I am looking for.
Software is being taken over by fashionistas and prima donnas who worry more about how a thing looks than how easy it is to use.
Let me say this loud and clear: a menu that changes depending on context like the Office 2007 shit is the one reason I removed Office from the Dell it came with and installed OpenOffice instead. I do not understand what problem it's supposed to solve, and it forces you to search the entire GUI every time you want to do something. Do. Not. Want.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Sorry to hear that you have insomnia. This being the Internet, I'm in Australian and it's 6PM for me.
Tell me, how do you add a section break using the ribbon?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
How to insert a cross-reference, which is a hyperlink by default: Insert [tab] --> Links [group] --> Cross-reference, or you can do it through References [tab] --> Captions [group] --> Cross-reference, or throw that bad boy on the Quick Access toolbar.
I don't actually understand why it would appear in those groups. The first makes sense only if you already know that cross-references are inserted as hyperlinks. The second makes no sense. A cross reference is a type of caption? Or you can only cross-refer to captions?
Just for comparison in OOo 3.0 on Ubuntu:
Insert [menu] -> Cross Reference [menu item]
- Blah blah blah, missing scientist. Blah blah blah, atomic bomb. -
Is that really true? The problem with the Ribbon (in the general sense) is that it's fine if a small picture can represent what you're trying to do - but some operations don't lend themselves to little pictures. Take "Save As" for example, or "Revert to last saved", even "Select All"!
The other problem is new users, we all recognise that three little lines usually represent text, but if you don't recognise that then "Left align", "Right align", "Centre" and "Justify" make no sense (and yeah, I thought it was obvious - but I've been asked about it enough that I'm beginning to doubt it is).
The problem with little pictures is they can be more cryptic. Now the ribbon is more suited to "modern" wide displays, but it does less well than menus on cramped displays (I'm thinking NetBook) a Menu will scroll (yes, I know it's horrible) but the ribbon is worse.
Don't get me started about how it makes you use the mouse all the time - constantly reaching for the mouse is a productivity killer.
So no, I'm not at all convinced that the Ribbon is a better way. As a UI element, it's interesting and I can see the utility in places but I don't think pictures are always better than words.
My mind is simply refusing to imagine Bill Gates in a sexual situation.
Why simply imagine ?
Ohhh, baby (Safe for work)
Squirrel!
Except Model-T's were counter intuitive. If you had the handle in the wrong place, when you started it up it'd run you over (which happened alot) and not only that, if you didn't brace yourself the kickback would break your arm.
But I get what you're saying, although, the Ribbon is to menus as the Model T Ford is to Traction Engines. It does all the same stuff, in a similar way as it's predecessor, but it tries to make it easier for the new person to use. And it failed. It tried to emulate the functionality of it's forebearers in a 'different but the same' way. Wheras the modern car system was a complete overhaul. The Ribbon is a step, but it's not an end, It's still hard to use, and almost as unwieldy to new users as the older menu system everyone else is accustomed to.
A *real* innovation is needed, but damn if I know what that'd be :P
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Yes, I'm sure that's what he meant. You have to spend 336 hours straight studying the Office ribbon before you can use it correctly.
It took me 336 hours to find the print icon on the ribbon bar, sigh.
I highly doubt that people save time using ribbons. Wading through many similar icons in random positions only to find that the option you want isn't there is hardly faster than drilling down through topic-oriented menus with standardised positions, until you find what is definitely there.
Limi notes, too, that Linux and Mac versions are unaffected by the change.
Good, otherwise the same minute I saw a windos "ribbon" on my Mac, Firefox would go straight from Applications to Wastebasket.
Seriously, copying others is all cool. It's how progress is made. But you copy the good parts, not the idiocity. That's what evolution is about - copy, mutate, weed out the crap. You can't leave out the third step, they're all important.
Advise to the Firefox people: Make it an option. Then gather statistics and see how many people really prefer it. You could be wrong. I could be wrong. You don't know until you test it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I've slowly turned to a regular Opera user. Allthough I still use other Browsers too - I'm typing this on Opera and have Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 3.0 up and running right now. All three with a large set of open tabs. ... Which, btw., as other have mentioned allready, does not show a ribbon.
After upgrading to Opera 10 I have to say it still leads the way in Browser innovation and more and more it's becoming obvious to me that other Browsers usually just rip it off after after a handfull of point releases. It's the same with the new Firefox UI pictured in the related article.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Being intuitive to a new user is one thing, but for such applications the existing users outnumber the new ones considerably...
One of the strongest lock-in factors MS has is familiarity, i know countless people who refuse to try linux or mac because it's unfamiliar to them, and i also know several people who, with no prior computer experience, tried linux or mac first and found it easy.
And i know several people who have been unix or mac users for years (myself included) who find windows extremely awkward and difficult to use.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Under the Page Layout Tab, there's a dropdown called "Breaks" in the Page Setup group. I've never used it in Office 2007 yet and it was in the first place I looked. To be perfectly honest, I actually thought it'd take me longer to find it than it did :P
Do you even know what Torvald's job is? He certainly doesn't do much UI design!
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Open up Word 2003. Grab a slide ruler and measure the height of the title bar + menu bar + standard toolbars. Fire up 2007. Repeat.
It's just as large. It just looks larger, because it has larger, friendlier, easier-to-reach buttons.
If you are on a tiny screen, choose 'Minimize'. It hides the ribbon until you need (click) it.
Stop the Microsoft Office ribbon madness! Install the totally free Ubit extension and you will have old-school menu in Office 2007/2010:
http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/
Interesting. However, a similar "total headfuck" still lives on in British (and American) measurement: feet, inches, stones whatever... Greetings from a happy user of the Metric System.
Firefox needs to remain operable from the keyboard. The idea of turning it into a mouse-only ribbon app clearly hasn't been properly thought through. They should forget this nonsense and concentrate on fixing the broken 'don't download updates', 'don't use Internet Explorer security settings' and 'don't send data to Google every time I type something in the address bar' options.
That's because most people are happy to use a word processor like it's a text editor with bold, italic, and fancy fonts.
Also, a big part of it is probably that most people don't actually learn the principles behind menus etc... they just memorise locations. If you're do that without any understanding of what organisation system you're using, then memorising the location in an entirely disorganised system will not seem any different to you.
I think the title of my comment say' s it all.
Anonymous Coward
So not under the Insert tab then. Most intuitive.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That's a +5 insightful?!? These things you say are simply not true.
Here are a few things you might not know, but would quickly discover if you actually tried using the software you criticise:
- On a default fresh install, the ribbon takes actually less space than menus & toolbars in previous versions. The ribbon also prevents clueless users ending up with a shitload of toolbars that take up even more space. Google Jensen Harris' blog, there's screenshots and figures.
- When the ribbon is collapsed, it will appear if you drag your mouse to the top of the screen. You get the use of your whole screen and no extra click.
- There's a still a small traditional toolbar next to the Office button, by default it has save, undo and redo, but every single thing that you find in the ribbon or elsewhere can be added (it's the only part that can be customized). So you can put all your useful stuff there, collapse the ribbon, and you have you old toolbar back, except it's in the title bar instead of below it, so it takes less space.
Any other false impressions turned into facts that I can help you clear up?
Except that the argument is that the ribbon is more intuitive. Why does it take 2 weeks to get acclimatized to the new interface again? I note that this is the same argument that could be made about the old interface!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
do not want
I think what people object to is not being consulted about UI changes. Mozilla are particularly bad for removing features people use every day or breaking their workflow somehow, and unless you are willing to download and try every beta version you as a user have absolutely no say in any of it. Even if you do get the betas, all you can really do is submit bug reports - once Moz has decided they are doing something, it is impossible to change their mind.
A small example:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469082
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477746
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503805
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509664
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324164
All that over 1 single about:config entry which could easily have been restored and not break anything for anyone.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Seriously. Use it for two weeks and then bash it all you like. But bashing it without even getting to know it is just stupid. I am pretty sure that you (as everybody) do more time wasting stuff in your life than this, and you are not even wasting "2 weeks" except if you use the ribbon 24/7.
...would be to make it more obvious to users that you don't need a separate toolbar for bookmarks.
On most new Firefox installs the first thing I do:
* rightclick empty space on the menu bar
* pick "customize"
* drag "bookmarks toolbar items" from the toolbar to the right of the menu.(ignoring the dialog box)
* click OK in the dialog box
* rightclick empty space on the menu bar
* uncheck "bookmarks toolbar".
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Well I've tried and failed multiple times to make Wing Commander operate on Microsoft and failed spectacularly...... but never mind that.
You can play WC in linux with wine. Or at least last year I could. I would expect that hasn't changed. The older versions need dosbox
Not all of us have hawkeye vision and huge screens - ie, space is important, and a menubar is fine in that regard.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
on a modern car, with the exception of park and lower gears
Your car has a lower gears contol? Wow. It must one of those long-promised flying cars.
Man: Where's my hammer. I always keep it on this hook on my toolrack .... ...
Woman: It looked messy so I thought it would be nicer over there in that drawer.
Man: Aaargh. WTF? Leave my tools alone.
Man: Where's my hammer. I always keep it on this hook on my toolrack
Woman: It looked messy so I thought it would be nicer over there on that shelf.
Man: Aaargh. WTF? Leave my tools alone.
[repeat until ManInsane = TRUE]
disclaimer: I use a Mac, I've never used the Ribbon UI, and I'm an HCI professor. These two facts make me competent to talk about it.
In short: Microsoft (which I do not support usually) people has done a lot of work usability-wise (see the end of this msg): no it's not eye-candy.
It's ok for some people used to the old interface to complain: they have to learn new ways of interacting, it's costly, but the designer's bet is that it will pay off in terms of efficiency at the end. ALL interfaces need users to learn before (hopefully) becoming efficient. Changing for changing will only oblige users to forget what they've learnt. But changing for more efficiency is valuable, and that's what Ribbon designers claimed they have done, and it seems the processus they have used to design the thing is good. I think you can't blame them for that.
A link about the story of the Ribbon: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx
In summary:
word 1: 50- menu items Word 2003: 250+ (not counting toolbars, small property windows etc)
something has to be done
design took five years
Designers have:
Visited people at their workplace
Visited people in their home
Invited people into our labs for freeform working and discussion
amassed over 10,000 hours of video of people using Office, Over 3 billion data sessions collected from Office users ~2 million sessions per day
Over the last 90 days, theyâ(TM)ve tracked 352 million command bar clicks in Word
tracked nearly 6000 individual data points
Analysis:
Which commands do people use most?
How are commands commonly sequenced together?
Which commands are accessed via toolbar, mouse, keyboard?
Where do people fail to find functionality theyâ(TM)re asking for(in newsgroups, support calls,etc.)?
They also iterate a lot to find new solutions, and they evaluate the solutions until they were satisfying.
I have no idea where you work, I assume you must be running IT for some Microsoft Gold-plated-Platinum Partner company, or some such. In all the places I had the misfortune to deploy Office 2007 (every time at the behest of some upper manager who himself or herself never bothers to actually use the computers, that's what "executive assistants" are for) it was a complete, unmitigated, fucking disaster.
The amount of complaints and confusion was just unbelievable. In all but one cases we ended up "downgrading" back to Office 2003. And that last case is not far away from that scenario, the idiot who pushed the change having his executive position threatened over this very thing, and is now hanging by his fingernails to his job, hopefully not for too long, so that we can get rid of that abomination in that last place too.
True, some users, particularly those who use Office on very rare occasions, do "accept" the thing, just like they "accept" everything else computer-related, simply as yet another black-magic voodoo that is just beyond them and they struggle to cope with it, baffled, just like they always did with all the other stuff on their computers. From those you rarely hear complaints, because they simply assume that it is they who are illiterate and so they suck it up, excepting an occasional guilty-looking (since they assume everything is their fault), sheepish request for help. Experienced users, with some very few exceptions, all revolted, to the point of causing disruptions in the corporate operations.
In other words, I have no fucking clue what you are on about. The experience you describe is diametrically opposed to what I have witnessed in the field.
Actually, scratch that, I did see a place where Office 2007 was deployed "successfully", if by "success" you mean ramming the thing down the throat of everyone by a dictatorial dictate, with all complaints directed straight to the trash can: the provincial government office. Apparently it was "in the contract" for some overpaid government-tit sucking "global" IT consultancy that they've "outsourced" their brains to.
i just hope there's a 'classic mode'. i'm somewhat used to the office 2007 ribbon, but its lack of user customization is annoying. i just hope they're going to do something 'similar' to the ribbon, like..update their GUI but not make it JUST like the office 2007 ribbon. lets hope for something good out of this.
who enter my class have any experience with Office 2007 and many of them have trouble relearning Word. But by the end of the first of four chapters on Word, they seem to grok the interface quite easily.
Before the University upgraded to 2007, we gave the course in 2003. I can tell you my students were more often frustrated by the old user interface than when using the ribbon. I think we all have had to go "menu hunting" for some functionality we knew was there we just could not remember where.
Most people, in my experience, who have trouble using the ribbon it is because they have memory-mapped where all the useful functions are in the previous versions. They get frustrated by the way 2007 confounds their expectations about how things should work. Its a bit like learning a new programming language. It can be frustrating until you grok the mindset the language uses to solve problems.
When you start a fire, be to windward of it. Do not attack from the leeward. -- Sun Tzu
Could it be because when formatting text for example, it makes sense to put it in the 'Format' menu? It's now under the 'Home' tab. These inconsistencies and illogical placements are throughout the ribbon.
You're implying the interface is fine because people eventually memorize it, but that isn't the point. The old system was more intuitive, where this one isn't at all.
Agreed completely! (and with Commadore 64 Love also)
From the perspective of someone who spends more time describing over the phone how to do something in office, rather than using it: The ribbon has completely decontexualized functions from their relationship to each other and from meaningful labels.
Even though I will concede that M$ Office has done a workable job of implementing this (and I'm sure Mozilla can as well) just imagine what horrendous implementations we will see as less capable developers make use of this new tool.
Proof? Scientific evidence? "Better" how? In what regard?
Just so you know, that "clunky" menu is a direct derivative of CUA, the system developed as part of the IBM SAA initiative over many decades of actual scientific research.
>>>"Word for Windows" file menu for 15 years
Yes and before that I used WordPerfect on Amiga, and GEOSwrite on a Commodore. The reason I was able to learn the Windows Word interface so quickly (i.e. immediately) is specifically because it follows a nice *linear list* of commands - like books in a library make it easy to scan the titles and find what you want.
The ribbon interface is neither linear, nor easy to scan. It's a mish-mash that makes finding commands difficult - like scattering the books in said library across a bunch of tables. It is an illogical method of organization (or lack thereof).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The ribbon is a terribly uninformative way to display information. It should be killed. Not duplicated. What's next? Clippy for Firefox?
>>>I think this most /.'ers hate the menus because MS created them.
Yeah accept I don't hate Microsoft, so that excuse is invalid. (shrug). Whatever. It wouldn't be the first time a corporation frakked-up and lost the loyalty of its users, due to a lousy bone-headed decision. Remember New Coke?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
What I was trying to say was twofold. First, don't let a bad teacher sour you on Office 2007. Second, that the old UI seems intuitive because you are used to it, rather than it being intuitive on its face.
I have a six year old niece who has been using a computer for two years or so. She does not find menus inherently intuitive. To her it is much easier to remember a picture (e.g. tool bar buttons) then to click on a certain word, and she really hates pop-up dialogs. What seems intuitive to some is not intuitive to others.
What I am trying to say, is that we have been indoctrinated to the point where we have certain expectations about how the UI should work. Those of us who are computer savvy are much more indoctrinated than those who don't enjoy sitting in front of a computer eight-hours a day. These expectations, generated by our previous observations, create the experience of intuitiveness. The level of indoctrination explains why casual Office users have a much easier time (re)learning Office 2007 than those who have used it professionally or for a long period of time.
To fall back to a car analogy, the old UI is like driving a car. We all watched our parents drive for years before we got behind the wheel. So when we started driving the interface seemed really intuitive. Using the ribbon is like starting to ride a motorcycle. The interface seems counterintuitive at first, but once you give up your "car" habits and expectations it works really well.
I have had this interface hate experience myself when I started using Linux. I had a hard time groking the UI decisions that GNOME made. I flipped back and fourth between Linux and Windows for a number of years, until I had built up enough experience with Linux that it did not seem counterintuitive anymore. I am now my department's "Linux expert."
When you start a fire, be to windward of it. Do not attack from the leeward. -- Sun Tzu
True. GW got some things right, but he wasn't exactly a shining example of a conservative.
McCain was even worse; I didn't even vote for him.
McCain could have done a reasonably adept job of screwing things up, but Obama will do it far better and I'm fine with letting the Democrats take the blame for that.
>>>But hey, we have Free Speech here; the government can't force us to stop talking about inches and feet and force us to talk about meters. That's good, right?
Yes being free is "good" and better than being a slave. My ancestors can attest to that.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That's because you're human. Your time is valuable to you, and you use words instead of pictograms to represent complex objects and conceptual abstractions.
That's because localization takes time and costs money, and your time isn't valuable to Microsoft. The cheapest way to internationalize is to use nonsensical pictures instead of words -- then localization is done for "free". (Well, free to Microsoft, at the cost of having everyone, in every language, have to puzzle out what all the stupid icons mean.)
>>>The only reason you're used to the menu system is you've been trained since windows 95
Longer that that! I was trained on GEOS '85 on a Commodore computer. The menu interface has been around a long, long time and for good reason - it makes it easy to quickly scan and find what you need. Ribbon just presents a bunch of pictures which are as confusing as reading Egyptian hieroglyphics.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I would still suggest your simply memorizing the functions under their new labels. I don't have a problem with change, when it makes sense, but moving a formatting function out of 'Format' and into 'Home' makes no sense to me and I don't think I'm alone in this.
The least they could have done is to make the Tab's more intuitive or put more thought into what functions they put into a specific tab.
I can only hope that if the Mozilla folks take this route, they spend time on make the interface intuitive. I have no problem with a tabbed interface. I actually prefer it in other products like Lotus Notes, but only if it's done well.
Maybe this is the problem. We techies are organized, and the average luser isn't.
We use file extensions, so we know what they contain. Microsoft, designing for the luser who doesn't want to know what the difference is between an .exe and a .jpg, hides the extensions by default.
We put our files in directories, so we know where they are. Microsoft, designing for the luser who has a shotgun blast of icons dragged haphazardly "My Desktop" (which typically features something like the luser's offspring standing against a grid of primary colors, and the brightly-colored file icons are scattered at random, not even in a fucking grid, in the noisy background, so as not to obscure the drooling kid's face :), takes it one step further and has a file explorer that, by default, hides the name of the directory.
The Ribbon is the natural extension of Microsoft's UI design pattern for the past 15 years. Hierarchical menus, grouped by function, that can be easily traversed by alternating between breadth-first and depth-first search techniques, into Ribbons of pretty icons scattered wherever the last idiot that touched my computer happened to accidentally drag them when trying to click on one.
>>>Something being intuitive is not what you describe it to be. It is the ability of a system to be learned and adapted to quickly.
In that case Ribbon == epic fail.
>>>potential future touch screen displays
Another bad idea. That last thing I want to do is spend 12 hours a day (at work and home) waving my arms at a screen. Talk about wearing yourself out! I'm lazy and prefer the use of a mouse which can be used with minimal exertion.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
My experience is quite the opposite. The school where I work switched to Office 2007 a few months ago. Most of the teachers and admin staff have asked for a re-install of Office 2003 because they don't like the ribbon, and don't find it intuitive. My fellow users range from power-freaks to beginners, so it's not simply a case of familiarity with menus breeding contempt for the ribbon. The obvious solution is to provide both menus and ribbons and let users decide which they prefer.
The reason I originally moved to Firefox was its no-nonsense, no frills, lean and mean functionality. Each 'upgrade' I install impresses me less and less, and it seems to me to be in danger of losing the plot.
Anyway : the reason you had trouble with it is not because it isn't intuitive, it's because you're very fluent with and accustomed to the old UI.
No, the reason I have trouble is because it is inconsistent and inefficient.
Imagine a modern car where the controls moved around and magically appeared and disappeared depending on whether you were in the city or highway, sun or rain, passing lane or travel lane. If the car detected it was light outside, the headlight switch was not available -- causing major delays when you were in a funeral procession. I'd take the Model T any day.
Muscle memory is about the most efficient humans get. A Magical Morphing Interface disables the fastest mode of the slowest link in the chain, apparently on purpose. Just another sign that MS only cares about getting people to BUY their stuff, actually using it is rarely considered.
And don't get me started about 3x the screen space for 1/3 the functionality....
I'm not going to debate with you, but I will admit I'm technically an MS partner (all that means is I take a test, pay $300 a year and get a metric ton of not-for-resale software). That said, I've never pushed this stuff and I don't resell so I have no profit motive. If these people liked OO.o, they would get OO.o
None of the companies I work for are Microsoft partners. A significant portion of the people I deployed to are CPAs and they spend ungodly amounts of time in front of two huge monitors filled with Excel. These people were most vocal about getting 2007.
Well that rather sucks. Maybe it looks prettier but I still find the thing annoying and really miss being able to at least push alt to get a classic menubar in office. At least that still works in MSN.
Apparently you didn't read the rest of the paragraph. Oh well, I guess you just know the people I work with better than myself.
I won't argue with you that removing the menus rather then hiding them was a bit ham fisted. They probably assumed seasoned users would never learn the ribbon with the menus available, but I think they don't give people enough credit.
Disagreed (although, you did say "most" people; I just dont' fall into the "most" category). I have to agree with a previous post that said the ribbon is the most unintuitive thing, ever. I gave the ribbon six months of testing, without bias or expectation. I used it with an open mind and found it frustrating so many times, I reverted to using Office 2003. When you say "the ribbon IS a much better menu system," you are obviously speaking from opinion, and that's fine, but don't denigrate others for not having the same opinion as you. For me, it's a matter of fact that the ribbon is a horrible implementation, just as it's a fact for you that it's a good implementation. Not all change is bad, agreed, but not all change is good, either. This qualifies as the latter.
LOL.. way to miss the entire point. Yes, I know exactly what he did and what he currently does with respect to Linux. Since you completely didn't get the point - it was that Torvalds is a god in the /. Linux-love world. I guess you missed the "if".
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
They went downhill after Office '97, when Microsoft realised that most of the functions in the Office menus were not used by most of the users, so they did the silly "collapsible" menu thing and hid stuff until you found it was there. Actually, I'd go as far as saying that the user interface for Word for Windows went downhill after Word for Windows 6.0, since the one that became part of Office '97 had clippy.
Good points - but I'm a little confused by why it's okay for us to differ in opinion on whether the interface is intuitive or not, but not okay for us to differ in opinion on whether this change is good or not? If the interface is more intuitive, the change is good. If not, it's bad.
/. opinion is representative of IT-industry opinion, or more importantly in this case - representative of Office/Firefox USER opinion. In fact, many in the IT-industry are notorious for forcing things onto users that users don't like, because IT thinks it's better for them.
I think taking a step back from either side of the argument - with a change this dramatic to the interface, you're ALWAYS going to have a side that hates it and a side that doesn't. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
p.s. Dosbox works great for Wing Commander
Then something is seriously wrong with you I'm afraid.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Exactly.
I never used the toolbar for anything except most obvious things.
I hate the ribbon for the same reason. 75% of the stuff could be
easily removed from it.
/off topic
So do they post km/hr in your state?
The US is nowhere near being metric, anything about and "extended" metric system is bs to postpone real change.
One of the most important indicators of being metric is when you can talk about centimeters in public and people understand you rather than look aat you like a deer in the headlights.
Example, the other day I was at the deli counter and asked for something sliced about a centimeter. I got a sheep looking back at me and regretfully told her just do it about half an inch. (I know half an inch isnt a centimeter, but I didnt want to confuse with the idea of a third)
Further, I'd wager the real reason stuff in the US has both metric and imperial units is so companies can use the same packaging in multiple countries, ie Canada, Mexico, Britain. They already have spanish on most of them, and french is starting to become more and more common >: In fact, they often list two phone numbers for customer relations. Canadian and American.
When I lived in Europe, lots of stuff had imperial markings too. Does that mean the Czech Republic uses feet and pounds?
Insert is for objects, like Tables, images, etc. A Break is a type of page formatting, not an object. IDK, seems to make perfect sense to me. I didn't even click the Insert tab when I was looking for it.
It's okay for us to differ on any opinion, however your post seemed to be a rant decrying all nay-sayers of the ribbon were just haters of Microsoft and/or change. I'm pretty confident, based on my own experience and conversations, that this is not the case.
Of course /. is representative of IT, in the same way that talking to a group of people at an IT convention is getting representation of the IT world. This is not a scientific poll, of course, but you can't take away the opinions that are expressed here, particularly the ones that are articulated soundly (as opposed to just vitriol).
What IT thinks is better for people is digressing from the subject matter, and I'm sure we all have our opinions on that.
But as for the ribbon, for me, personally, there's so many kinds of wrong with it, I'm amazed that anyone sees it as positive. Given the choice, I'd rather not use it, and this is the path I've gone with.
Cheers
Too many fellow Americans I know cannot calculate 10% in their head. How would having an entire system based on multiples of 10 help them?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
You're right, I didn't read it all, because for most organisations the rest would be predictable. When I read the rest, it seemed pretty clear that you were directly involved with Microsoft, and that's been confirmed (by you) with other questions and answers below. Like others, I don't know of any (other) organisation where that pattern has emerged -- certainly not spontaneously, without intensive effort.
In office 2003, my first order of business when I am issued a computer is to make a custom toolbar with all the default buttons (*and* custom buttons) of functions that I use regularly; the rest of the default toolbars are then closed. The end result is one ~25 pixel toolbar; I rarely have to dig into the "file edit.." commands to find what I need -- it doesn't get any more intuitive or useful than that.
ZOMG!! Dimension leak!!! ;)
I agree that the ribbon sucks though.
His point (which I agree with), is that all things being equal, the ribbon is a better interface than the file menu.
Except that it isn't. If you let it use more space, it functions the same as the old way. If you hide it, it takes longer to use. What's the advantage supposed to be?
Plus I need two sets of hex wrenches, two sets of sockets, two sets of taps and dies, etc.
Actually, for food items, they're required by law to have the metric units on there.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
On foods and medicines, yes. That's dictated by the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, with the intent that we would eventually phase out the imperial units.
Take a look around and tell me what besides food are marked with both.
Around here, speed limits are posted in miles per hour. Cars themselves have speedometers in miles per hour, with tiny little numbers for kmph. Gasoline is measured in Gallons. Scales at the deli, despite being food, show the weight of something in decimal pounds (rather than pounds and ounces, since those aren't base 10).
Now, a few industries settled on metric units so that they could sell things internationally, but besides those are food/drugs, everything else here is in imperial.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
--(clearly superior) metric system.--
Not superior in all applications, just easier because everything is base 10, where the imperial system bases it measurements on the material requirements. So it really doesn't matter any more what the units are. Money is base 10 in the US but the pound sterling was based on something else altogether and I don't think it had to do with numbers.
Sub-dividing the shilling (or nickle) into 12 pieces is consistent with the idea of dividing a dozen into 12 units, although probably too small to be of any use today.
Are you a perl programmer by any chance?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
having to use strange numbers to get around its weaknesses (especially in cooking, who wants to deal with 1.25ml of oregano, and 0.625ml of freshly ground black pepper.
I'm not sure if you're trying to funny, but you do realise how ridiculous that statement is, don't you? You're complaining that you get unfriendly numbers that result from not being able to calculate ratios. WHAT ON EARTH does that have to do with the metric system??
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
especially in cooking, who wants to deal with 1.25ml of oregano, and 0.625ml of freshly ground black pepper. And people claim the US system is messed up
Yeah, and I just had to use 0.527925978 pints of milk.
And yet you insert a page break under the Insert tab. That sort of negates what you say.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yeah, didn't really expect a +5 for that.
Wait, so it becomes an expand-on-mouse-over control when you minimize it? The biggest UI abortion of all, and scourge of the web? Which method do they use to expand it? Time delay you have to wait for every single time you want to use it (waste) or immediate appearance that screws you up if you have to move the mouse from the top of the window to click somewhere in the top of the body (frustration)?
Thanks for the heads up on that one--I hate shit that expands on mouse over even more than I hate useless wastes of screen space. Expand-on-mouse is just solving one bad problem with a worse one. It makes the interface either slower or frustrating to use.
What I really hate is the fact that people expect to be able to use a computer with absolutely no training at all. I'm sick of the extreme complexity we (developers) are being subjected to just to make things "simple". It's bitter get-off-my-lawn-ism, really, and I'm not afraid to admit it.
If our schools were a little better, maybe we wouldn't have entire generations of people convinced that they're too stupid to learn how a computer works. We accept that it takes some training to drive a car. Why must it take *no* training to use a computer? Nobody is too stupid to learn to look through menus to find what they need. It isn't hard. Driving a car only seems so intuitive because almost everyone who is alive today grew up watching people do it. And even if that was not the case, there is just not that much to a car. Accelerator, brake, steering. We could make REAL simple interfaces if our computers only had three main inputs.
Actually, on a modern car, with the exception of park and lower gears (which most people STILL don't understand), on an automatic transmission, they don't have control over the shifting anyway.
Afaict this varies a lot depending on where you live. Here in the UK the vast majority of vehicles still have manual gearboxes. Afaict this is driven by two things. Firstly people beleive they are more economical. Secondly if you ever want to be able to drive a manual you have to learn and take your test on one.
But afaict there is a lot more difference in control layout between a model T and a modern manual than between a modern manual and a modern automatic.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You can insert a Page Break under the Page Layout tab as well :P
I can stand here arguing the minor details with you all day, but the fact is that those don't matter, because I never said it was perfect, I said it was better, and cited objective reasons for believing so. You have yet to do so other than give your own anecdotal opinion of being frustrated by it.
Haha, yes, because I subscribe to the MAPS program I'm "involved" with Microsoft. I would be stupid not to given the clients I support. Maybe you could read up about it.
Actually, in a way I feel honored to be accused of being a MS shill. Imagine the money I get; backhanded deals from ol' Bill himself.
I have plenty of issues with MS, but nerds bent out of shape over Office's user interface make me scratch my head. You know vi, Gimp, Blender and lots of other OSS apps have non-standard UIs, but they are still great applications.
This is the second time this week I've come across an anecdote that was moderated using something that made no sense whatsoever. Whomever marked this as flamebait needs to get a grip on reality. (Just because you take offense at something someone says doesn't mean they meant to hurt your feelings.)
did you hear the whooshing sound?
there is no print icon on the ribbon, its a item off the orb menu only.
Well, I guess we'll agree to disagree, and I'll continue using products other than Word 2007. More power to you if you find it more useful! I don't really feel any of the things I'm talking about are minor, because the whole point was that it's meant to be intuitive, and intuitively if I want to insert a section break (which is actually quite a common occurance for a document of any complexity) I would have looked under the Insert menu.
There are other instances of this sort of thing, but similarly I could go on all day and I fear it's not something I want to do!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
-1, All Things Are Not Equal (it's "all other things being equal", i.e., change-only-one-variable-style debugging).