Mozilla Reveals Firefox 4 Plans

Barence writes "Mozilla has given a breakdown of its plans for Firefox 4. Perhaps the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface, which takes a great deal of inspiration from Google Chrome. 'Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem,' said director of Firefox Mike Beltzner during the presentation. Also mooted was the ability to give applications such as Gmail and Twitter their own permanent tabs for easy access, and the introduction of a 'switch to tab' button, allowing power users running hundreds of tabs to quickly find the one they want. Beltzner said Mozilla was also looking at replicating Chrome's tactic of silently updating the browser in the background, removing the annoying wait when Firefox first loads up."

Comments

Re:Retarded

[kyrio]

"the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem". What a joke.

Sounds like speed holes

[Abstrackt]

Anyone remember that episode of the Simpsons? "These are speed holes. They make the car go faster."

Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Sockatume]

A qualitatively "faster-feeling" browser and a quantitatively "faster-running" browser are not mutually exclusive. They are more likely to be utterly orthogonal.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[wjousts]

Personally, I'd rather have the browser go faster than look faster.

Personally, I'd rather have a stable browser with useful features that I use than a browser that can render a page 0.1 second faster. I really don't understand this obsession over the speed of the browser.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Hurricane78]

Well, to me it looks exactly like Microsoftitis. The disease where don’t come up with other ideas, but imitate others, always runing behind them, but by definition never catching up. And if you can’t imitate or only imitate it badly, you at least make it look like it does, and make it all shiny.

I hate to say it, but: It’s the point where a project has jumped the shark.
Because projects rarely get out of that endless catching up race again. And they forget about actually innovating and leading the way.
I hope the Firefox team can quickly recover. But I don’t put any money on it anymore.

Maybe someone comes up with some KHTML or Opera thing that can beat Firefox’s range of extensions. (And make no mistake: People don’t switch their browser, until ALL features that they use are available PLUS some more. Same thing happened with the Internet Explorer. The same thing is true with Linux. (But with Linux, I don’t want it, since then it wouldn’t be Linux anymore, but would have become what it hates.)

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Chrome's interface is crap. I might use XP, but I turn all the candy bullshit themeing off. Then chrome comes on & forces me to use it again, as if I'm in Vista or something. It's fucking lame.

Linux / mac are horrible about using system colors. Windows used to be the ONLY OS that acutally got it right (well, mostly), but now they've managed to fuck that all up too in new versions.

So what does it mean?

Every OS sucks...

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[gbjbaanb]

Now for 4.x they're talking about emulating Chrome, which I tried out briefly and found very much not to my liking

Amen. If you want a Chrome UI, use Chrome.
I mean, what next, A Ribbon?

Its bad enough that they have a huge round back button, as if I can't figure out which one I need to use to go back a page -- just like IE.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The menubar is probably hiding under the Alt key. That's something that's possible to do even now (in 3.6 Windows you can hide the menu bar if you want -- it will show when you press Alt; Linux build requires a plugin but does the same thing) and is helpful when you've limited vertical space. IE does something similar as well.

Speaking of Linux, I wonder if they're finally going to change the menu item locations to be the same across platforms... ("Preferences..." I'm looking at you!)

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[wjousts]

I rather think that for 99% of the people in the world, the biggest impact on their internet experience is network speeds, not rendering speed.

Re:Sounds like speed holes

[cp.tar]

Speaking of Linux, I wonder if they're finally going to change the menu item locations to be the same across platforms... ("Preferences..." I'm looking at you!)

There's nothing wrong here. Under Linux, you find Preferences under Edit. Under Windows, you find them under Tools. On a Mac, you find them under Firefox (or Cmd+,). The program needs to be consistent with the platform.

H.264 support?

[elrous0]

First of all, am I the only one who hates Chrome's interface? But that's just window dressing, the real question is will it support H264/HTML5?

Re:H.264 support?

[betterunixthanunix]

Do you want to foot the bill for H264 royalties?

Re:H.264 support?

[Abcd1234]

Supporting H.264 doesn't mean FF has to actually ship the codec. Go learn about GStreamer and DirectShow, then rethink your silly argument.

Re:H.264 support?

[camcorder]

It would cost 3 cents now.

Re:H.264 support?

[delinear]

H.264 has already won, it's already used everywhere. The more they fight, the longer Flash video will survive. Does Adobe pay Mozilla or what?

Why is everyone so eager to suddenly replace one proprietary format for another? I'm not saying that h.264 is the wrong choice, it certainly seems better than the competition right now, but just because the licensing group are playing nice at the moment, don't assume they will always play nice. Maybe the right choice is to stick with Flash a little longer to further development on an open source alternative and Mozilla have got it right. I guess time will tell as h.264 looks pretty inevitable now, I just hope we're not having similar discussions in a few years about how we're shackled with it as a format and the people behind it are screwing everyone.

Re:H.264 support?

[Scrameustache]

h.264 and HTML5 aren't synonymous - HTML5 just provides a video container, the browser vendor decides what codecs to allow, so it's entirely possible to fully support HTML5 yet still have no h.264 support.

It was also possible to sell fully functional VCRs that weren't VHS. But it wasn't easy finding content for them.

Re:H.264 support?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

First of all, am I the only one who hates Chrome's interface?

No. Most people hate it. However most graphics and UI designers, tech reporters and iThing owners love it because it is the latest and most shiniest flashing glitter ball that they must play with. These are the people who make and demand interface changes. These are the people who actually think that menu bars are a "waste of screen space". These are the people who think that putting tabs outside of the program window frame is either a useful or desired change. These are the people think that "minimalism"--giving the user less and less controls or options--constitutes a step forward at all costs.

Firefox's UI is fine. But because of these people, resources at Mozilla are being wasted on needless keeping up with the Jones at Google. Meanwhile actually needed features like speed, process separation and support for self signed certs are being sidelined while the team focuses on making the browser shiny.

Google is a steamroller, and is aiming to squash the other browsers flat. Firefox included. Lack of realistic leadership, as manifested in these proposals, will only ensure that Google succeeds where Microsoft has failed.

Re:H.264 support?

[Goaway]

Because there is no other choice at the moment which stands a snowball's chance in hell of actually being used. You can support Theora as much as you want, but that just means content producers will keep using Flash, because that is what gives them the video quality they want.

Your choices are: Flash and h.264, or just h.264. The latter gives you the choice to sneak in Theora on the side for those who still want it. What sane person would pick the former choice?

Re:H.264 support?

[Kjella]

From the numbers a lot of people have posted, it would only cost about 3 cents per copy of Firefox.

Neither Firefox nor x264 could be used that way, the GPL requires an essentially limitless sub-licensing rights (technically it could be limited to GPL only software) and that's not part of the license. The closest you could have is a non-free plugin not based on x264, since flash is ok I guess that is too. The best solution would be to simply let the system codecs handle it, and if not fall back to flash. Win7, OS X has it native and most Linux users will install x264 anyway...

Re:H.264 support?

[betterunixthanunix]

So in the end, we are still going to pay for H264 royalties, but we'll do so through our OSes instead of Firefox?

For the record, my OS does not ship with H264 support.

Re:H.264 support?

[elrous0]

Having to memorize keyboard shortcuts to do anything is for shit. That kind of crap went out in the 90's, along with command line interfaces and DOS. If your design is so minimalist that a user has to remember keyboard combos to do anything, then you've designed a shitty GUI, end of story.

Re:H.264 support?

[delinear]

Oh I don't disagree that Flash needs to die, this has been my standpoint for much of the last decade for numerous reasons (accessibility and indexability of sites even back before mobile devices and performance and security issues made it a hot topic). Nobody would be happier to see the back of it than me, for all the reasons you list and more, but the fact is that it's going to be around for a while yet anyway (there are too many people using browsers with zero HTML5 support), so it might be a good idea to reflect on what the best replacement is, from all perspectives, not just the "anything is better than this crap" perspective which assumes that nothing is potentially worse than this crap.

As for tying the tag to the format, I agree that theoretically it's easy to switch in another codec, but once most of the content on the web is using one format it will be a massive undertaking to switch. As you say, the image element isn't tied to any particular image format, but of the hundreds of image formats out there, how many does your browser support? and if it's more than 3, how many of those formats have widespread support/implementation on the web? My worry is we'll be tied to one codec just like we're tied to three image formats (actually, three is generous considering I still frequently have to struggle with IE6's lack of proper alpha transparency on .pngs even now), and at that point the H.264 licensing body can really turn the screws, if they so choose.

Re:H.264 support?

[the_womble]

It is not exactly easy to find H264 content either.

It is quite possible that everyone will stick to FLV, because it will continue to be the most widely supported format. Its also possible, if less likely, that Google will be able to persuade everyone to install VP8 plugins by using Youtube to spread it. Its also possible (if still less likely) that Theora will gain enough steam to be a contender (everything except IE and Safari will support it out of the box, if those two groups can be persuaded to install the plugin)

Silent update

[Ant P.]

It won't be "silent" if it keeps that obnoxious behaviour it does now, where it interrupts you with a new version splash page. It's no less rude than a popup ad.

Re:Retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

at a magical and unbelievable price too!

"the faster it will seem" ?

[ifrag]

Seems faster? In my experience it has been more than "seems", Chrome actually is faster. The thing keeping me on Firefox is the various add-ons which I cannot get in Chrome. If Chrome were to get vertical tabs, that would go a long way towards making a switch.

It would be nice if Firefox did improve performance though. Would be a lot more significant than a trimmed down interface while the program runs just as slow.

removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[Anita Coney]

Thank you! That is the most annoying part of Firefox. I hate when I open Firefox and it makes me wait while it updates, and then when it finally does open, it does so on a pointless tab that offers me absolutely no useful information and once again delays what I'm trying to do.

I don't like the secret/stealth update either. Here's a very simple idea:

First, install the update when I shut down the browser. You're not wasting my time then because I'm done using it. Second, don't give me a tab telling me what I already know. I know it was updated, I just fricken saw it updated. I'm not an idiot.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[porcupine8]

First, install the update when I shut down the browser. You're not wasting my time then because I'm done using it.

Unless the whole reason you're shutting it down, as is often the case for me, is that FF has been running so long that it's become an enormous memory hog and you need to shut it down then restart it so your system will speed back up. Or you're shutting it down in order to shut down or reboot your entire computer. I agree with the previous commenter, just give us the choice.

Re:removing annoying wait when Firefox first loads

[dancingmilk]

Like I said, if you want to run out of date, potentially buggy software, that's on you. For the general user it makes a lot more sense to have auto updates enabled by default.

You are a power user, you can't expect software designers to design their apps to your ridiculous (and frankly IMHO stupid) expectations. For every one of you there are 30 Joe Average's using the browser. Joe Average needs those updates on.

The faster it will seem?

[Yvan256]

Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem.

Just because an interface looks simple doesn't mean it looks faster. Who thinks like that? The "Speed holes" reference" above is quite right. Those UI designers either have been misquoted or are just complete fools.

What a simple interface means is that common tasks should be more obvious to do.

Don't give the users 100 options at once, especially things that only power-users use only once in a while. I'm not a fan of putting options in tabs and sub-menus, but sometimes it's the right thing to do.

Put the basic features at the beginning, the most obscure ones at the bottom. Put them in named groups such as "Basic", "Advanced" and "Expert" if necessary, so that non-technical users aren't afraid to mess with the basic ones, and advanced users don't waste time looking for what they need in the basic and advanced options.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[AnonymousClown]

More screen real estate. With the small screened netbooks being all the rage, that menu bar does make a difference.

Thanks for nothing

[rudy_wayne]

the most striking change to Firefox 4 is the user interface, which takes a great deal of inspiration from Google Chrome.

Great. That means I will be staying with the current version of Firefox for a long time. I just tried Chrome a few days ago and the user interface totally sucks. What is is with these people who have to fuck up a good design just so they can make it different and justify a new version number.

Re:Retarded

[delinear]

GP's point is that there are real performance gains that they could be making (Chrome doesn't just appear faster because of the interface, it is faster in benchmark tests), and while the UI is important, it's pretty telling that they're focusing on the UI changes rather than telling us about the fantastic performance gains they've made (kind of suggesting that they haven't).

stop messing wih the UI

[Anonymous Coward]

its hard enough to convince users that the internet isnt the blue E on their desktop and use Firefox instead.
keep changing the UI and sure as dammit they will be back using the blue E,
it may take us geeks a couple of minutes/hours to get used to a new UI but the average user it takes forever and they want familiarity they dont want to hunt for that buried option or find the new print button, hell some people dont even know what a home button is! and they absolutely hate having to throw away the knowledge gained on learning an applications UI just for it to change again

Tweak the default UI slowly, very slowly.

and for the record Chrome's UI sucks like Fisher Price (an example in gone too far in dumbing down)
eg. removing https:/// from the location bar after we (the security/it industry) have spent 25 years teaching people to look for it when signing into their bank/mail etc.
lets trash all that training and start again ? after all that business training is free right ?
and and people wonder why IE is standard in corporations ?

perhaps Mozilla should start working on aiding administrators (group policy options (have you seen IEs massive list?) /locking down functions/ automatic updates that are truly automatic and dont need user interaction etc)
instead of playing with fluff.

A.Dmin

Re:stop messing wih the UI

[Lumpy]

Step 1 - replace Firefox or Chrome icon with the blue E.

step 2 - set the new browser to default and remove all ability of the user to fire up IE for web browsing.

Step 3 - there is no step 3. if they ask, It's a new version of the "internet" and they need to get used to it.

Hundrerds of tabs?

[andy1307]

Seriously...if you have 100s of tabs open, you have ADD or you need to learn to let go of your tabs. Relax. Close them. They'll still be there when you wake up.

Re:Hundrerds of tabs?

[BZ]

Or you use open tabs as your todo list.

Mozilla Foundation is a U.S. company

[tepples]

And some people live in countries where software patents are not even legal. Why should they pay anything?

Are you willing to foot the bill for the emigration of the entire Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation to one of these countries?

Re:Menu Bar..?

[chrb]

Is the menu bar really that useful? Apart from using it as a way to get to Preferences, I can't think of a single option that I use the Firefox menu bar for. Also, it takes up some screen area; on small screen devices it may be more optimal to drop the bar make the functions accessible from elsewhere.

Aint broke, don't fix it.

Maybe. On the other hand, Chrome has grabbed 20% market share in one year which is no small feat. There are reasons that people are switching to Chrome - allegedly quicker browsing and the user interface. It's worth experimenting with a similar approach in Firefox. Maybe it will work out, and maybe it won't, but if they don't try we will never know.

Sounds like.. progress bars.

[Tei]

Most progress bars on the world are there to make the wait more fun. Drawing the progress bar takes CPU, and probably some activities sould be done in a incremental way, to be progressbar friendly, where a bach apropach would be faster.
Most progress bars are not really needed, but make programs feel faster by making programs a bit slower but more fun.
Anything that make a program 0.1% slower but feel 20% more faster is better for everyone. Yea, any human.

Re:Sounds like.. progress bars.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In that vein, it should probably be mentioned that many progress bars are purely for psychological effect.

The ones that just have a moving gradient, or a bar that zooms back and forth don't actually indicate progress at all, they just reassure the waiting human that the machine is working, rather than frozen, which apparently makes the wait seem shorter.

Also, outside of some fairly specific niche applications(and video encoding/transcoding, which may not count as 'niche' these days), most progress bars that would last long enough to be visible are probably not there to indicate the status of a CPU constrained process. Pretty much any computer that runs on single-phase current at 15 amps or less is ridiculously powerful in the CPU department, but has severely questionable I/O performance.

Re:Retarded

[Eraesr]

Aren't we discussing semantics here?
It's pretty obvious what the man means. An application with a simple user interface works much nicer than an application with a UI that's littered with ambiguously labeled buttons and hidden menus. If you have to click 4 times to get something done, an application will feel (seem/look/whatever) slow compared to when you can do that in one single click as well.

One thing I hope is that "silently updating in the background" doesn't mean there will be some sort of "Firefox updater.exe" service loaded in the background when I start up my PC. I hate it when applications do that.

Gmail and Twitter their own permanent tabs

[FreakyGreenLeaky]

Provided I can delete these "permanent" tabs. If not, fuck off.

Central Management Please!

[rAiNsT0rm]

I'd love to switch our companies users to FF but having no way to centrally manage/monitor and update is a complete killer. There's no way we can have users with 10 different versions and different issues, etc. It's a nightmare. Give me a cool central control panel and have each browser be able to be hooked into it and it would be amazing.

Re:Central Management Please!

[Ant P.]

Give me a cool central control panel and have each browser be able to be hooked into it and it would be amazing.

It's called Landscape.

Re:Retarded

[pete-wilko]

Yes, because increasing user satisfaction shouldn't be an objective for a browser which is constantly trying to increase its market share...

Much like the story of people complaining about elevators taking too long to arrive, and the installation of mirrors stopped the complaints, this is much the same. If users perceive the browser to be faster, then that is just as important as it being faster from a user satisfaction point of view.

Re:Retarded

[iapetus]

If you don't understand the difference between perceived performance and actual raw performance, and how the former can frequently be more important than the latter, then I'm guessing you haven't had to deliver a complex user interface based product before.

Wrong definition of "power users"

[Hurricane78]

allowing power users running hundreds of tabs to quickly find the one they want.

Sorry, that”s not “power using” but “being a messie who clutters things up”.
The same type of person whoses desk is full of paper sheets and his display borders are full of post-it notes.
In other words: No a very healty person, and not someone you would want to hire.

A power user would use TabMix Plus storable sessions and bookmark folders, plus TagSifter tagging.
Or even one writing his own extensions.

But I guess the guy who wrote it considers using any kind or CLI something only experts use...

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU...

[clone53421]

Dialogue boxes - including those requesting geolocation or other data - will appear as bubbles specific to individual tabs, meaning you can continue to navigate around the browser without being locked down until you've answered.

FINALLY.

Never again will I be alert-bombed.

(I looked for an add-on to change script alerts, confirms, and prompts into something non-modal. I couldn’t find anything.)

Why copy Chrome?

[kimvette]

I ask the Mozilla folks: why copy Chrome? If I wanted to run Chrome, I would run that instead. I run Firefox because it's firefox and has a GUI which provides a lot more functionality, and I install extensions to add to that functionality (firebug, web developer toolbar, adblock, tinyurl, colorzilla, cooliris, google toolbar, etc). I LIKE menu bars, and being able to turn features on and off, but having a basic toolbar, status bar, and menu bar enabled by default. I hate the current trend of dumbing down UIs and making them look like they were designed using Play-Doh (make that play-d'oh).

Want to know what you should work on instead? Sandboxing each tab, sandboxing plugins, decreasing memory utilization (with the realization that you can't do much about flash, quicktime, mplayer, etc. plugin memory utilization), fully multithreading the UI so one tab waiting for a message queue doesn't freeze the entire browser, and work on the javascript engine so it is on par with Chrome, etc.

Seriously. If all you do is reinvent Chrome, why bother? By offering a Chrome clone, any reason to run Firefox disappears.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[clone53421]

No, dammit. Someone shoot this guy.

Options that are very specific to an object can be attached to that object’s right-click menu. The right-click menu for the page in Firefox is fine as it is. Mine already has a Reload Every option (added by my Tab Mix Plus addon, I think), View Page in Coral IE Tab, a DownloadHelper submenu, RefControl options for the site, and a ScreenGrab entry. Those are all options specific to the page that I’m viewing.

File, edit, and view are better served by keyboard shortcuts and/or mouse shortcuts (e.g. ctrl-scroll zoom).

History, bookmarks, preferences not specific to the page that I’m viewing, and help should not be cluttering up the right-click menu. Give me my menu bar and leave me alone.

Wish list

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what firefox needs most from my perspective:

- Multiprocess build: everything plugging away at one core isn't really ideal..
- Task manager: what page is hidden away in some inactive tab sucking up CPU due to javascript? (No, I don't want to run noscript.. I do have yesscript though). Also memory usages would be useful for some people.
- Why are pages in hidden tabs or on different desktops using CPU anyway? If it's not in front of me I don't really need it to run in most cases. Slashdot's pause functionality with firehose was a good thing.

Since I end up with maybe 8 virtual desktops with a workflow on each one in a firefox window there, if I want to do anything fun the browsing experience becomes pretty sluggish.. I pretty much have to fire up chrome if I want to use a JS heavy site/youtube/etc.. which can't be right.

I know a multiprocess build is underway, but waiting is frustrating and I see more and more people switching to chrome each day.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Iyonesco]

I use Bookmarks menu to access and organise my bookmarks. I use the history menu to open tabs I've recently closed or go back to websites I've recently visited. I use the tools menu to access options, addons and clear history. I use the file menu for print, work offline and occasionally import.

In answer to your question then, yes the menu bar is very useful. It provides rapid and structured access to a lot of functionality. When I use an application with a menu bar I can always find the functionality I'm looking for easily but in applications without a menu bar (Office 2007, Chrome etc) I can never find what I'm looking for.

Menu bars provide a consistent interface across all applications so even if you haven't used an application before you know where to find options and featurs. Removing it gives every application a custom interface, making it very hard to use unfamiliar applications. Put a Office 2003 user in front of Office 2007 or an IE6 user in front of IE7/8 and and they'll struggle to use the application. However if you get an Office 2003 user to use Open Office or an IE6 user to use Firefox they'll be able to adapt very quickly thanks to the consistent interface menu bars offer.

When Microsoft started the trend of removing menu bars with Vista and Office 2007 I believe their aim was not to improve the user experience but to lock users into their applications. An Office 2003 user can adapt rapidly to any other Office suite thanks to the similar interfaces, however if someone is only familiar with Office 2007 it will be very hard for them to adapt to other suits because Office 2007 has a completely custom interface that is inconsistent with all other applications. This way they're locked into MS Office and Microsoft wins again.

The removal of the menu bar is a travesty of interface design but it's a massive win for Microsoft and, bizarrely, organisations such as Mozilla seem happy to help them along.

Re:Final blow to Firefox

[clone53421]

Whoops. I wasn’t done.

Contrast that to the Ribbon, which is no easier to actually use – once you know how – than menus were – once you knew how. It’s selling factor was that it’s easier to learn to use.

So everyone who already knew how to use the menus has to re-learn a new system, albeit one which is supposedly easier to learn than menus were. The easiest thing for them, however, would have been to not learn anything and continue using the system they already knew how to use. You force a bunch of people to re-learn something without making it any better. That’s wrong.

The Awesome Bar is actually better IMHO and that is why it was a slightly different situation... and it wasn’t even as difficult of a transition as the menu-to-ribbon switch. The Awesome Bar at least still functioned in most of the same respects that the address bar had traditionally done.

Re:Hundreds of Tabs?

[delinear]

To expand on this one-word answer, they really are two different things. One lets you open a new page, the other lets you find a tab you've already opened - if you seriously have so many tabs open that you need a manager (and I quite often have in the region of 30-40 open), the last thing you want to do is use bookmarks to open more tabs with the same content. What I'd really like is some way to categorise tabs - I have much different requirements depending on which project I'm working on, or if I'm browsing for leisure/shopping, etc. It would be nice to say these 10 pages help me when working on project X, and these 7 on project Y, and these 12 on project Z, so let me assign a button to each group so I only have the relevant tabs running at any one time and can close the rest down without facing a nightmare when I need to restart them.

Power users with hundreds of tabs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly some kind of joke...

Before I switched to Chrome, I couldn't use more than 10 or so tabs without the memory usage going through the roof, and I'd need to restart. Show me someone using firefox with 100 tabs who isn't using a supercomputer.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[BenFenner]

Firefox's best part trick is the UI's ability to be customized. All they need to do is keep it that way. I don't have a netbook but I too am very conscious of vertical real estate. I also love my menu bar. I use it all the time. Bookmarks are there, the print option is there, etc.

You can fit the menu bar, navigation buttons, address bar and search bar or even Google toolbar (don't ask) on one horizontal section saving tons of vertical space. See image:

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y113/benfenner/Firefoxmenubar.png?t=1273593698

As long as I can still control how things look I should be happy. Give me a ribbon I can't turn off or re-configure (MS) or tabs I can't move down (Chrome?) and I'm not a happy camper. Make it configurable.

Re:Menu Bar..?

[Jay L]

When Microsoft started the trend of removing menu bars with Vista and Office 2007 I believe their aim was not to improve the user experience but to lock users into their applications

No, their aim was to solve the problem that menu bar discoverability doesn't scale, to the point where the top 10 feature requests for Office were features that were already in Office.

See:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F00_/default.aspx