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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.
There actually is: http://www.askvg.com/insert-classic-menubar-and-toolbar-in-microsoft-office-2007/
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
It is an option.
"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."
The link you are probably looking for is this one:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/11/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible.aspx
It's a link to Jensen Harris's Office 2007 blog, where he collects all the articles he wrote about the Office 2007 UI (the "ribbon"), explains WHY it is the way it is, provides (IMHO) rather insightful comparisons against the old menu & toolbar paradigm, and generally does a good job of explaining why they chose the ribbon over the "status quo" of toolbars and menus.
That said, a ribbon-based UI is not always the answer - like toolbars and menus, it can be abused by people who don't think UI design through carefully enough, but it is a clever and intuitive answer to "option overload."
"Programming is the fine art of making a machine that has absolutely no intelligence act as though it does."
Gone are the menus that go halfway down the screen. Gone are the submenus nested three layers deep.
True, but the issue here is that Firefox do not even suffer from these problems.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
There is no "algorithm" in the ribbon, unlike in earlier (menu driven!) versions of Office.
Unlike the menus in, say, Office XP or Office 2003, where some items were "hidden" until you used them, in the ribbon EVERYTHING is there. It doesn't try to "adapt" to you. Sure, you have to re-learn where a lot of stuff is, but that was often the case before the ribbon came out as well (because more features kept getting squeezed into a menu-driven UI that just wasn't made for a program with that many options).
The only thing that changes in the ribbon are some contextual tabs that show up at the end, e.g., when you have selected a picture or a table. These tabs are meaningless normally, so they are hidden. But they don't re-arrange themselves based on your usage patterns - they are static and don't change.
"Programming is the fine art of making a machine that has absolutely no intelligence act as though it does."
Hahaha what? Firefox's UI is by far the slowest of all major browsers. Layout is specified in XML and loaded dynamically every time it's needed. XUL is one of the most embarrassing aspects of Firefox. I don't think even a ribbon could make things any worse than they already are.
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.
There already exists one: http://vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Ummm...they have had context-aware menus for years. It's called 'right clicking'....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The screenshot in TFA would seem to indicate that what they are calling a "ribbon" is simply the same interface that Chrome and Safari are already using.
Hell is other people's code.
Hurray for people not reading TFA:
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
But simple applications like Firefox do not actually suffer from this problem
Which is why Firefox isn't adding Ribbon. They're just remaking their interface to work more like IE8 (in that menu bar is hidden by default, but shows if you use Alt to activate it). Please have a look at the actual screenshot, and I dare you find any resemblance of Ribbon there. Also read the actual primary source. The only place where it even mentions Ribbon is this bit:
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.
which is not a statement of intent regarding Firefox, but rather an assessment of the present state of affairs in Windows UI design guidelines. Where TFA has gotten the idea that Firefox will have "Office 2007's Ribbon", I don't know, but it's simply bullshit.
Yes. And TFA is taken initially from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback, which is discussing the direction of *applications* written for Vista and Windows 7 that don't use the menubar, but use a contextual strip (Windows Explorer) or Office Ribbon (Paint and Wordpad). That paragraph is about the rationale for not showing the menubar on Vista and later in Firefox, not on adding a ribbon to Firefox (it is under a Hiding of the Menubar section).
It seems as though a blogger misread this paragraph, and everyone on the interweb has been taking this as fact, without actually RTFOA (Reading The Friendly Original Article).
From the pcpro article referenced in the /. summary:
"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."
From the Mozilla page:
"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."
Note that here they are talking about Vista and Windows 7, not Firefox (and also note the "Many apps ..." bit in the last sentence).
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
Good thing that the ribbon takes up the exact same amount of space as the old toolbars and menu did, then: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx
The document viewing area by default in Word 97 and Word 2007 is literally the exact same, except 2007 actually gives you slightly more space horizontally. PowerPoint is the exact same. The only significat difference is that you do lose a row with Excel, but as someone who works with Excel on a daily basis, I'd gladly take the ribbon over the menu any day. Additionally, you can collapse the ribbon (double-click a tab or hit Ctrl+F1) to save space. I'd guess this would save at least as much space as collapsing the old two-row Word toolbar into one, if not more.
Space, my friend, is not an issue. (Not to mention that Mozilla isn't really going to the "ribbon," anyway, but that's another story.)
R.Mo
Ew, that's one of the worst things I found about the UI of IE7. If you accidentally touch the alt key, or you start to press an alt-something keyboard shortcut and change your mind, *everything* jumps around as the menubar jumps into existence.
If you want a menu bar to become visible, put it in front of something else that you aren't going to use at the same time. Making the whole UI of the application jump around and re-render is really annoying.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Here's the problem: while KDE and Gnome are strongly influenced by the interface introduced with Windows 95, were there any real decent alternatives that could be easily picked up by "newbie" end users? The windowing interfaces you saw on SGI and Sun workstations in the late 1980's and early 1990's weren't paragons of ease of use.
We forget that Microsoft has spent a HUGE amount of money in their Usability Lab doing nothing but studying how user interfaces work for computer programs. That's why Windows has a generally pretty consistent interface on the surface, and someone used to Windows 95 could fairly easily pick up learning and mastering even Windows 7.
... 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.