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Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon

Posted by timothy on from the what-about-in-gnome? dept.

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.

4 of 1,124 comments (clear)

  1. Eyecandy in cost of usability by sopssa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability by jandrese · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
  2. the haters won't notice, but... by spyrochaete · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.