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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 had no idea it was April already.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Please, don't.
Why take away a perfectly good, easy to use menu and replace it with that shit-tastic ribbon concept?
I can understand having it as an option for those few people who actually like the ribbon (which, IMHO reduces usability, while taking up way more space), but forcing that garbage on the general public seems like a waste of both energy and goodwill.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
There's some argument to be made that Firefox should fit in to Windows, if that's where it's running.
My question is, will this abomination also be applied to other OSes?
Menus exist for a reason (they are useful and organized), and the "Ribbon" takes up more space than the menus. The Ribbon's "Contextual" interface just means that things aren't in the same place all the time. It means that action A is not always in action A's spot, and sometimes action B is in action A's spot. It's just terrible. I guess that's the last I'll be using of Firefox.
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...
No, wait, I mean that other thing -- lame!
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
Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon
Many To Replace Firefox With Opera
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Am I the only one that's not mad at them for doing this? In the article, it clearly states that this is entirely optional. Just hold down the alt key and it'll change for you.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Dear TheMCP,
I use a PET2001. There are no menus. It has no graphical rendering. I can't even get Lynx to run on it.
This letter has as much to do with the discussion as yours does. Please take your fellatious Mac worship elsewhere.
Love,
Red Flayer
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
No. We've had this argument for decades with keyboard layouts. The cost of retraining and adjustment is far, far too high.
This move kills Firefox stone dead. Mozilla can kiss its market share goodbye. Why would anyone choose to use a browser that's increasingly overshadowed by Chrome IE and Safari that requires a completely new way of interacting with it? It's just too hard to overcome that entropy. You have to really, really want to use it.
Personally, I will never use this as long as I live. I've already become jaded with Firefox over the awfulbar debacle, and the fact that Firefox really doesn't work well on a Mac.
I'll stick with Firefox 3.0 until such time as Chrome is available for Mac.
Firefox is the new Netscape. It will end up exactly the same way.
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
Q: What is a webbrowser supposed to do? Display web pages.
Q: What should most of the screen be? The websites.
How often do you really use the menubar? 90% of the time its wasting screenspace and as people push for a consistent UI across platforms it's worth making the change. The next move for them is to take after apple and remove the pointless status bar in favor of a safari style loading/link in the addressbar.
The ability to hide the menus is one of the many reasons i use KDE over gnome, if I'm having a conversation/watching a video/file managing I don't want to be wasting window space on a menubar i rarely use. The only advantage of a fixed menubar is that people are used it, well i for one welcome the menubutton revolution that will force people to get used to menu buttons and make this point moot.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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.
I'll wait until the obvious font problem is fixed.
The context sensitive ribbon... what 'contexts' are there exactly? I'm viewing a webpage or.... viewing a webpage. That's it! It's not like Word where I might be editing text or drawing a table, or manipulating an inserted image.
Most of FF's menus are related to the configuration of the system. And configuration of the addons. This could be a little better organized but it's certianly not broken or a priority for redesign.
Imagine trying to tell your grandma over the phone how to set an option: "Click on Tools, then click Internet Options"... oh wait... there's no more menu. "Click on the icon that kind of looks like a toolbox with a wand over it... er".
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
I've been using chrome on linux for months. it is way faster than firefox in every way and flash works just as good as it does in opera or firefox.
The developer tools don't seem totally finished, but for the most part are a replacement for firebug for my purposes.
there is an annoying regression right now where select drop downs don't hide after you've made the selection but that is fixed in webkit and chromium trees so I'm just waiting for the next dev release to trickle down...
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.
I saw mockups on Planet Mozilla a while back that they had carefully thought about each part of UI and decided to greatly simply the UI. The mockups reminded me a great deal of Chrome.
I can't imagine the "ribbon" will look anything like Office 2007. I'm guessing they will take advantage of the ribbon API present in Vista and 7. That doesn't mean it will actually look like Office 2007. MS Paint in 7 uses the new ribbon API, and it looks really good.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
Here's a nice little car analogy : if you gave a modern car to someone used to a Model T, he would find changing gear awfully counter-intuitive, have to learn to drive again almost from the scratch, and complain loudly that it worked just fine so why the hell change it. The modern approach is still better.
Jesus, here we are on Slashdot, and people are bitching about Microsoft not maintaining backards compatibility...
Actually, on a modern car, with the exception of park and lower gears (which most people STILL don't understand), on an automatic transmission, they don't have control over the shifting anyway. He would probably appreciate the power steering and brakes as well. The driving interface is quite possibly the best user interface I know of, because the basic design hasn't changed since the days of the horseless carriage.
To continue with your car analogy, the switch to the ribbon is like switching a car to a joystick... It might be more intuitive for younger people (who play too much Xbox), but it isn't necessarily the best tool for the job.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Mod parent down.
The ribbon system allows for the logical grouping of actions by function.
What, exactly, is logical about the Home ribbon in Excel then? SMASHED in with cut/paste is formatting and sorting. None of which are particularly clue-ful or present any sense of order whatsoever.
How come there isn't a 'File' tab with lots of file functions smashed together?
In addition, every common action can be performed in two mouse clicks or less: one to select the ribbon governing what you would like, and one more to select the specific action.
Opening a file? at least three clicks. Printing? three clicks. Sorting? At least two, probably more clicks for most sorts. Data activities? Three clicks at least. Stop spreading misinformation
I'll give you the undo/redo buttons conform to your claims, and there is 'buttonizing' of some things that Microsoft probably had complaints about, but as broadly as you make your claims they are materially false.
Please, don't change the scope of your sweeping declarations in order to for your claims to approximate truthiness.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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...
>>>people are bitching about Microsoft not maintaining backards compatibility...
Well I've tried and failed multiple times to make Wing Commander operate on Microsoft and failed spectacularly...... but never mind that. - Improvement is only an improvement if the overall usage is improved. Yeah I know you're probably thinking "No shit sherlock", but that basic idea is something many people overlook.
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. It's the computer equivalent of tacking an organized library, and just randomly tossing books everywhere. Yes the books might be neatly arranged, but they are still random to the eye, and finding the book you want becomes very difficult.
Put the books/menu commands back in a nice, serial order so the human eye can scan and find what it's looking for.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Apple has a look and feel that screams Apple. Most vendors comply with the look and feel. That Aqua, gray and blue like look.
GNOME has a HIG that they really would love for everyone to follow. You're not forced to but, you can almost spot the applications that don't follow the GNOME HIG. That makes up a lot of the look and feel, add Ubuntu's wonderful brownish / orange; Fedora's blueish; or SuSE's green everywhere and you have a look and feel that screams the distro's GNOME.
Microsoft has the Aero glass and wonderful (*snicker*) ribbon. Microsoft is slowly getting everyone on the glass and ribbon theme. There is no absolute rule that you must use glass and ribbon styles on your Microsoft application, but people notice when it doesn't match up. It gives Microsoft that Post-XP look and feel.
In the end, operating systems are trying to make a look that defines them, that people can easily recognize. Much like Google has their own look and feel of blue and flat that they've got going on. People identify readily with a unique look and feel and that is, in a nutshell, cheap advertising. There is nothing wrong with developers not going along with the look and feel an OS uses, Winamp comes to mind as a big one, but it automatically points out that the user is using something different, something not part of the OS; and if the OS is using a really slick look and feel with all kinds of neat effects, not going with the OS look and feel makes you look dated, or posing (if you're trying to do your own slick look and feel effects.)
For 90% of us here on Slashdot, this is all just a bunch of useless eye candy. However, it's a real important factor for the other whatever percentage of the general population who just buy into marketing hype.
Chrome looks out of place on Windows sans the glass effect. It looks like a giant blue rubber browser. However, that doesn't mean that it is silly, just looks exactly not like a Windows Vista/7 application. We can debate the merits of looking like a Windows application till the cows come home, point being it looks out of place.
Whatever your take is on the ribbon UI, I won't argue you there, but that's where Microsoft looks like they're heading for general UI, just like Mac OS X puts the menu bar at the top of the screen. It's just part of that look and feel and companies are very geared to have a distinct look and feel so that people can instantly recognize that the product in use.
So are we going to toss stones at Mozilla for actually going the with the look and feel of a Windows program, when they try to achieve the same on Mac OS X and Linux? I think the better answer for all the people who are heading down to the rock quarry is: If you do not like the glass/ribbon look and feel, maybe you should change to an OS that matches the way you want it to look?
I can almost hear the angry replies, but I will say this in my defense. The look, feel, and usability of a given OS is a marketable thing. I ditched Windows when I saw what they were going to do with Windows post-3.11. I couldn't stand it, but I understood that this was the way Microsoft was going (start buttons, browser like file navigation, etc...) I can not fight a war with a company that is trying to market stuff. So, I switched to an OS where I could dictate how things are going to work, Linux. I've not looked back since.
We just need to understand that Mozilla is bringing their application to look like a Microsoft application, just like they did with the Linux version of Firefox when they added GTK+ integration. Just like they are trying to do with making Firefox look like a Mac OS X program. So, come on, if you don't like the direction MS is taking with their look and feel, stop waiting for more applications to break ties with the Microsoft look and feel. Instead, switch over to an OS that matches what you want. It's not that hard really, and after a few weeks, you won't notice the difference. Let's make peace, not cast stones.
I don't think I will like this on FF. BUT in office it works. I actually like it.. I can find features that I used to use and always had to google for at my finger tips..
IMHO the office ribbon bar is the menu system for office finally done right.
will it work in FF? I don't know.
More annoying than this is as of FF 3.5 you can now longer kill the instance if you close the last tab.. Instead it is noop or blank, that's fucking annoying!!!
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
My biggest problem with the system is the strict use of pictorial representations of functions. I don't know what "Properties" or "Insert" or "Cross Reference" is supposed to look like. Nor would anyone be able to describe to me how to find them since they would be describing a tiny icon picture which I would then have to interpret instead of using a single word explanatory statement.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
You are all complaining about a complete non-issue. But this is /., so that's to be expected. The ribbon actually IS a much better menu system once you get used to it. All the normal things that most users generally use are pretty easy to find, and many of the mid-level and intermediate things they weren't already aware of are presented more easily. And, the shortcut keys for advanced users weren't changed for the most part.
Most people who actually give the ribbon a chance get used to it in about 2 weeks - much better than most software changes as big as moving to the ribbon. It's just the people railing against it for the sake of railing against change who can't handle it.
Get over it. Not all change not initiated by YOU is bad.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
I'm sorry, but you're quite wrong here. Previously used conventions are a major part of UI design, but abandoning old conventions for better ones is both a major and necessary risk at times. By your definition, how intuitive a system is depends entirely on the person using it, and the results of testing would have no objective value. The fact is that old Office menus were complete garbage, and we only liked them because we'd been using them for the better part of almost 2 decades.
I remember my heuristics professor once telling us how she was at CES one year and there was this black device at one of the booths. It just looked like a box, and had no buttons or anything, and she stood there for a while trying to figure out how to turn it on. It never occurred to her to just touch it. When she did, it immediately lit up and exposed interactive elements on it's surface.
Something being intuitive is not what you describe it to be. It is the ability of a system to be learned and adapted to quickly. Prior knowledge of other systems can either help or hinder this scenario, but the baseline is from the perspective of one who's never interacted with this sort of technology before. If you are accustomed to other systems for the same task, but which function differently, this will be an obvious hindrance as your mind subconsciously begins looking for the same conventions, which are notably lacking. The real measure of its worth is how long it takes to relearn how to use the new system.
I was personally hesitant to try it as well, and put it off for about two years, but found it surprisingly comfortable to use when I finally capitulated. Additionally, it's very obvious that the ribbon's real purpose is actually to provide a common interface for legacy, and potential future touch screen displays, with its use of large buttons and more area.
Don't get me started with these bad car analogies. I'm still pissed about moving the high beam switch from the floor to a stupid stick on the steering column.
I keep getting my left foot caught in the steering wheel switching to low beams.
Have gnu, will travel.
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?
Except that even once you're used to it, it still takes up a HUGE chunk (relatively) of vertical screen real estate which you can never get back. You know, the dimension that's becoming less and less available as the OEMs beat the "widescreen" drum because they can claim the same number of inches for less pixels?
On my install of firefox 2, I have the toolbar, menubar, *AND* address bar all stuck on the same line. It takes up 16 vertical pixels. The tab bar is another 16 pixels. This is a godsend on tiny screened devices. Yes, I may be able to hide the ribbon, but it's not very useful when it's hidden, is it? It adds another click to *everything* that simply does not need to be there. Used to be, in Word, I could cram all of the functions I use often (including "hide spelling/grammer errors") onto one toolbar. One toolbar which would fit next to the menubar on most screens. The other functions were there under the menus if I needed them. Can I do that now? (Maybe I can--if the ribbon can be reduced to ~16 or so pixels tall while still giving one-click access to functions, then maybe it's less of an abortion than I've given it credit for.)
I can't understand why vertical screen space is treated like it's free and unlimited when really it is becoming more precious with time.
They are NOT using the ribbon, they're using two buttons like in Chrome. The direction they're going is actually very interesting, and I suggest you read up on it yourself. These two buttons just set the stage for some cooler stuff in 4.0.
>>>Most people who actually give the ribbon a chance get used to it in about 2 weeks -
Wow. 2 weeks of my life wasted so I could save 1/4 second selecting my command. Yeah. Benjamin Franklin had a saying about that - "Penny wise; pound foolish," to describe people who count pennies but spend dollars recklessly.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Microsoft's flagship product the operating system "Windows" will yet again reach new lows in sucky UIs. Firefox and others to follow suit. Mozilla spokesperson has stated: "We will not be outdone by neither Windows nor Internet Explorer. We promise to bring you a product that surely will eclipse anything Microsoft has ever produced and bring more suck to the world, open source style!".
On a more somber note. Mozilla, stop following Microsoft and do what you originally did with Firefox, outdo them. Seriously can't be that hard, honestly.
I am not a fan of the ribbons either. They seem to complicate things unnecessarily. Change != Progress, Differenent Better
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?
It's also difficult to describe to another person on the phone. That can matter because some of us poor suckers have to provide telephone tech support to people and stuff.
At least with a classic text menu you can say, "See the menu bar? Now click on File, then Print, etc.." Its a whole lot easier with words up there.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
<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
I'm really surprised that the Slashdot crowd has so much trouble with the ribbon. I'm an IT consultant and across all the people I've deployed Office 2007 to, not one has had more then a handful of questions and zero complaints (at least with regard to the ribbon). Many people actively sought a budget to get 2007 after seeing someone else use it, I never pushed it on anyone. On top of that, people are using styles instead of hand formatting everything, creating locked forms and templates (and editing them later without calling me for help) and using all sorts of feature, sometimes asking me about features I had never used. I've been using it so long, it's far more jarring to try to go back then the transition ever was. Plus auto-hiding the ribbon works great on notebooks / netbooks. Of course, I don't see how it will work in a web browser, but I guess we will see.
True. However, if you want to walk someone through the new interface over the phone, it SUCKS.
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.
I dislike the ribbon interface because I find that the many actions take 1 to 3 more mouse clicks compare to the classic office interface.
I tried the change. I don't think it is an improvement.
... 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.
> 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 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?
The one who is using the keyboard shortcuts.
Conclusion switching to the ribbon is a waste of time. Adding keyboard shortcuts and documenting them would be better.
Lots of companies like to target their UI for naive users. Very few create UIs for users who will be skilled - except for stuff like games - there are games which allow skilled users to do very many "actions per second".
The tired myth that the metric system is somehow "superior" because it is base ten is even more ridiculous on a forum dominated by people who are used to working bases other ten.
The metric system is not one system of measurement, but a whole bunch of systems just as arbitrary as most other systems of measurement. Some of the measurements work out to numbers that are good for some scientific work, others may work out for numbers that are convenient for everyday use. Clearly not all of them work out. The idiots who decided that pure water's boiling and freezing points were the only possible definition points of the temperature scale are even worse than the people who decided that the Office 2007 ribbon design was better than a toolbar.
I can live with some aspects of the metric system, but to call it superior when I'm constantly having to use strange numbers to get around its weaknesses (especially in cooking, who wants to deal with 1.25ml of oregano, and 0.625ml of freshly ground black pepper. And people claim the US system is messed up) is just silly.
What makes a system superior has nothing to do with does the system evenly divide into ten.
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.
This move to add a ribbon doesn't actually matter. Last time I checked, Firefox was written with a free software license. So if everyone hates the new ribbon, there's always the forking option. We can just modify the program to not have a ribbon. Problem solved.
Limi notes, too, that Linux and Mac versions are unaffected by the change.
Good, otherwise the same minute I saw a windos "ribbon" on my Mac, Firefox would go straight from Applications to Wastebasket.
Seriously, copying others is all cool. It's how progress is made. But you copy the good parts, not the idiocity. That's what evolution is about - copy, mutate, weed out the crap. You can't leave out the third step, they're all important.
Advise to the Firefox people: Make it an option. Then gather statistics and see how many people really prefer it. You could be wrong. I could be wrong. You don't know until you test it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
I have no idea where you work, I assume you must be running IT for some Microsoft Gold-plated-Platinum Partner company, or some such. In all the places I had the misfortune to deploy Office 2007 (every time at the behest of some upper manager who himself or herself never bothers to actually use the computers, that's what "executive assistants" are for) it was a complete, unmitigated, fucking disaster.
The amount of complaints and confusion was just unbelievable. In all but one cases we ended up "downgrading" back to Office 2003. And that last case is not far away from that scenario, the idiot who pushed the change having his executive position threatened over this very thing, and is now hanging by his fingernails to his job, hopefully not for too long, so that we can get rid of that abomination in that last place too.
True, some users, particularly those who use Office on very rare occasions, do "accept" the thing, just like they "accept" everything else computer-related, simply as yet another black-magic voodoo that is just beyond them and they struggle to cope with it, baffled, just like they always did with all the other stuff on their computers. From those you rarely hear complaints, because they simply assume that it is they who are illiterate and so they suck it up, excepting an occasional guilty-looking (since they assume everything is their fault), sheepish request for help. Experienced users, with some very few exceptions, all revolted, to the point of causing disruptions in the corporate operations.
In other words, I have no fucking clue what you are on about. The experience you describe is diametrically opposed to what I have witnessed in the field.
Actually, scratch that, I did see a place where Office 2007 was deployed "successfully", if by "success" you mean ramming the thing down the throat of everyone by a dictatorial dictate, with all complaints directed straight to the trash can: the provincial government office. Apparently it was "in the contract" for some overpaid government-tit sucking "global" IT consultancy that they've "outsourced" their brains to.
My experience is quite the opposite. The school where I work switched to Office 2007 a few months ago. Most of the teachers and admin staff have asked for a re-install of Office 2003 because they don't like the ribbon, and don't find it intuitive. My fellow users range from power-freaks to beginners, so it's not simply a case of familiarity with menus breeding contempt for the ribbon. The obvious solution is to provide both menus and ribbons and let users decide which they prefer.
The reason I originally moved to Firefox was its no-nonsense, no frills, lean and mean functionality. Each 'upgrade' I install impresses me less and less, and it seems to me to be in danger of losing the plot.