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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.
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 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...
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
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
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.
Actually, Ribbon takes more vertical space than the simple menubar. Theres lots of horizontal space to waste, but no vertical (and even more so with the move to HD dimensions)
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
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...
It says toggle, I'm assuming the idea is that you hold it down for a second and then the menu switches from one to the other until you do that again. And like all mozilla options, it will probably be set-able in about:config
...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?"
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?
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
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?
<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.
/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
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.)
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.
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.