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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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).
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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.
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.