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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
Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon
Many To Replace Firefox With Opera
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
See, I get it for Microsoft Office. Its alot user intuitive for users to find the save and print and formating buttons with the ribbon system they've got set up. Good for that.
But seriously, when was the last time I used the menu bar in any browser? I enter a URL... I browse... I close it when I'm done...
I hate clutter at the top of the sceen, eating up valuable viewing space for bigger pictures and such. I was upset when IE snuck a Search Toolbar in there without me really asking - since its automatically set to search if the URL doesn't resolve to anything... But whatever, removed it and got over it.
Now they want to take that less than an inch menu bar and make it take up 2 inches of my screen so that I can NEVER use it. Besides the fact that I never find a need to go in there, everything will be relayed out and I probably won't be able to find what I'm looking for when I do need to.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.