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.

Comments

Eyecandy in cost of usability

[sopssa]

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.

Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability

[COMON$]

Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive. There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done. Putting features in front of the user rather than 3 to 4 deep in a menu system is far more intuitive. In fact I think the office ribbon layout is due to a massive amount of consumer research on Microsoft's Behalf. (I cant find a reference for that right now).

However, I will believe this change when I see it.

Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability.

This is actually a point of contention among usability engineers.

The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive.

Intuitive is a rather subjective term. Rather the question is how learnable it is and how functional.

There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.

The learning curve for new interfaces can be problematic. Any change will meet some resistance. MS's ribbon will probably meets more than most because of vocal minorities and because the coupled it with a switch that temporarily eliminated some features. So power users of Word were frustrated partly by a new interface but also because they assumed they could perform a task and the interface was preventing them, when in truth the task had become impossible coinciding with the new interface.

Putting features in front of the user rather than 3 to 4 deep in a menu system is far more intuitive.

The problem is if the needed feature is in front of the user and determining what is needed where. If a menu system is more than three levels deep, you've failed as a UI designer.

In fact I think the office ribbon layout is due to a massive amount of consumer research on Microsoft's Behalf.

The consensus I've seen seems to be that it is based off of the the U of W's Decision-Theoretic UI project, but where MS was unable to get it to work properly so they scrapped the fundamental adaptive nature and just kept the UI style. The underlying concept resulted in mixed results for UI designers in the first place, so maybe that isn't too terrible and the design of the elements they copied were at least sensible and obeyed fundamental principals of UI design.

MS does not seem to have published their usability testing (if they did it and followed the results which is always a question with MS) but have published PR pieces claiming that user studies show improved usability; of course not publishing that underlying study either. Scholarly works to date seem to contradict their claims, but some of those were a little less than methodical in implementation. I think MS managed to piss a lot of people off and introduce a new UI scheme which is questionable but not terrible in and of itself.

Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability

[spun]

The kind of feedback you are talking about is useful for tweaking a UI, not for coming up with a novel UI concept to begin with. The kind of 'advanced research' I'm talking about is the sort of stuff that came up with the concepts in the first place. You may want to read some of Brenda Laurel's publications on human/computer interaction, that was the stuff that got bastardized into Bob and Clippy. The idea for the ribbon interface also came out of university research, not Microsoft's labs.

Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability

[CarpetShark]

Thankfully, I'm sure there will be a theme or add-on to fix this GUI abortion.

Yes. I imagine it'll be called EpiphanyForWindows, WebkitFF3Theme, FirefoxLite, or something similar. Chances are though, that the Firefox project itself will just plough ahead with this stupid idea, and ignore everyone who disagrees. Any project that fixes it is likely to be a third-party effort.

Whatever. I'm just waiting for a stable version of Chrome that has adblock support.

Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability

[jandrese]

I'm confused about this point, and it has come up several times now. Menus are grouped logically based on the actions as well, that is not unique to ribbon. In fact that's the whole point of a menu, to keep stuff organized and easy to find.

The thing that drives me nuts about Office 2007's menu is that I'll use a function on something, then move to a different part of the document and discover that the function I just used is gone, even though it would still be valid. Then I'm forced to flip through the various ribbon tabs to find the function on a different ribbon that looks different and has slightly different options (oh, this one has blue and grey instead of blue and pink for some reason). It drives me nuts. I'm forever hunting around on the stupid ribbon for wherever the function I want wandered off to.

Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability

[Jay L]

The ribbon makes finding more obscure things a very very slow process, with all these ribbon change, new menu open things going on, compared to simply reading all the menu options.

Apparently Microsoft thinks otherwise - and they have hard data from the actual clickstream of Excel users. The whole reason they introduced the ribbon (and got rid of the awful UI "improvements" of Office XP and 2003) was that (a) other than the top 10 commands, everyone uses a different subset of Office functionality, and (b) the top 10 feature requests were already in Office. Everyone thinks Office is bloated, but just like pork-barrel politics, everyone means something different by "bloat".

Office had already grown way past the point where you could discover a feature by reading all the menus; that's why they tried Personalized Menus and Task Panes and all that. According to Microsoft's data, the ribbon is more discoverable than the old UI - though obviously it requires relearning, and thus rediscovering a bunch of functions all at once.

That said, Firefox clearly doesn't have the massive command vocabulary of Office, and I can't imagine there are any Firefox features that were too hard to find via menus. This seems more like copycatting.

Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability

[Miamicanes]

> (Heck, Windows has pretty much _always_ had one of the most responsive UIs.)

(grabs paper towel to wipe Diet Mountain Dew from the display... AFTER blowing as much as possible from nose once the coughing stopped)

Windows has always had one of the easiest-to-hang UIs (with the possible exception of pre-OSX MacOS and PalmOS) of any modern OS, thanks to Microsoft's retarded architectural philosophy of putting the application in charge of managing its own UI effects and redrawing itself on demand. It's why a badly-written Win32 app can't be minimized, usually can't have its window moved, might swallow its mouse pointer, and needs ctrl-alt-delete to be involuntarily killed. It allows the consequences of that braindamaged app to spread beyond the application itself, and affect the working of every OTHER running application, too.

It's why a 20+ year old Amiga running at 7.16MHz had a UI that was, in many ways, more responsive than Windows running on a 3GHz quadcore i7. Intuition (the Amiga's window manager) was completely indifferent to the state of running applications. If you clicked a close gadget, it XOR'ed the nanosecond you clicked the button, and returned to normal the moment you released it. The app itself might have crashed beyond repair 20 minutes earlier, and the gesture might achieve nothing besides the visual indication of a close-gadget click, but at least there was zero doubt in your mind that the click was made. If you saw the colors invert, and the app didn't close, you knew INSTANTLY it was hopeless, and just cycled the power. There was no "did Windows see my mouse click?" ambiguity.

Ditto, for window moves. If an app died a horrible death and froze, you could still move the window, and its contents obediently moved right along with it. The hardware didn't care... bitmap bits were bitmap bits. You could cover and uncover the window, and it looked exactly like it did before. Unlike Windows, Intuition genuinely didn't *care* whether the app was still working. It did its thing, and got out of the way. Compare that to Vista, XP, and just about everything since the invention of Active Desktop... where you might not even be able to show the Start menu for ~45 seconds if something in a web page being requested by FIREFOX (an app completely unrelated to Windows) or IE causes a fractured DNS lookup to hang Explorer's stupid, brain-damaged single-threaded name resolver that gets used for everything from DNS lookups to figuring out the meaning of "C:\" It's not *quite* as bad under SMP as it used to be with a single core/CPU... but it still happens, and it's still incredibly annoying when it does.

why???

[revlayle]

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...

I would generally agree with that research.

[brennanw]

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.

the haters won't notice, but...

[spyrochaete]

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.

Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal

[digitig]

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).

Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal

[bay43270]

<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.