What's wrong with menus?
I *like* menus. Why slavishly follow Microsoft (or fashion)?
Anyway, at least with Firefox, there will either be an easy way to get them back, or someone will soon write a menu plug-in!
Mozilla is planning to radically overhaul the “dated and behind” Windows version of its browser’s user interface by considering the introduction of a Microsoft Office-like Ribbon in its Firefox 3.7 release. The outfit said in planning documents that it might drop the current menu bar in the Firefox UI for version 3.7. The …
I have to admit I quite like the idea, although more for a change in the Links toolbar which I use quite a lot, I have about 20 shortcuts on there and just the other night I was wondering whether some kind of Ribbon/spinning toolbar would be sensible, or maybe I could just buya wide screen monitor to make them all fit....Of course if a plugin is available for the current version of Firefox, feel free to let me know.
this is what kde4 has done:
1. decide they know better than their users
2. decide to fix something that for the majority of users ain't broke
3. try to copy microsoft's perverse idea of what a good user interface is
...hence after 10 years as a perfectly happy user of kde i'm now moving to gnome.
google chrome anyone?
Mozilla planning to implement something like "efFluent" ribbon bar in Office 2007 - great idea, that'll make it totally useless for users!
Still at least - according to the article - this'll be an option (unlike the crap forced onto the world by Orifice 2007)
Seriously, here'll be one part of the Mozilla community that'd vote "no" if asked.
Personally, if they've got spare developer cycles, why not make FF more stable and a little bit faster - not that I'm complaining at the moment, but it never hurts to be "better". Oh, and address the memory footprint that some have complained about.
But whoever invented that bloody ribbon should be hung by it.
It's the main reason people I know prefer older versions of Office - it looks shagnasty, and it's just plain horrible to use.
If there was a 'throwing up' tag I'd use that, but there isn't so I'll have to settle for 'fail'.
Not only do we have to spend half an hour updating our software every time we turn our computers on, we are also to be required to learn new interfaces every third day. Luckily I no longer use the damn machine for anything very important, but it must be a burden to those who are still trying to do useful work.
I'm not the only one who thinks that the ribbon sucks.
I'm not a stupid person. One of the things I do is get paid to figure out how to use software and then instruct people how to use it themselves.
Clients with Office 2007 think the ribbon sucks as much as I do.
To hell with the ribbon, I think it's completely un-intuitive.
With a menu, you go through until you find something that looks like what you want to do. Every time I am forced to use the ribbon on a client's machine, I can't figure out where anything is.
I'm on Outlook 2007, but the rest of Office is 2003 here.
I don't want a Firefox ribbon forced on me. At least give me a choice.
... oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo^36
I absolutely HATE the Office ribbon.
Safari *has* a menu bar. Last time I checked chrome does too.
If mozilla starts to look like IE7 I'm dumping it and looking for something else. Why can't mozilla look like mozilla? What's with the desire to carbon copy microsoft even when their offering is a total disaster? IE7 is a bear to use, compared to any other browser out there.
At the moment, no comments have been posted, so let me see if I can summarize the salient points of this thread before any show up:
1) Firefox has become bloated and inefficient, and the developers should go back to the 2.x/1.x/0.x code base.
2) Opera did it first, back in 1975.
3) "Windows sucks anyway so this is just one more reason to use FreeBSD Linux."
4) Generalized Ribbon interface hatred followed by repeated posts pointing out the obvious fact that changing back to the menu-driven interface will be simply accomplished by switching the theme.
I'll check back later to see if I missed anything.
Whatever you do, make it an option! The ribbon is horrible in everything I've seen it on, and having the menus as an option lets people get a proper interface back. It shouldn't be too hard to do either (particularly since every other platform is apparently going to stick with menus.)
"Microsoft debuted its controversial Ribbon interface that it prefers to dub 'Fluent' in Office 2003."
The ribbon debuted in Office 2007. I will never forget it, because all those who insist on punishing themselves and refuse to transition to the simple task-based interface provided by the ribbon all continue to use Office 2003.
Seriously, the ribbon in Office is a huge annoyance. When I went to a, pretty basic, UI design course, one of the items they touched on was not to show/hide command objects too much based on user input. That was mostly intended to keep menu items visible, if grayed out, rather than hiding them willy-nilly.
Anytime you choose a different header in Office 2007 the whole ribbon goes all over the place and it is difficult to remember how a particular function is accessed because you have to activate the header items (Home, Insert, Page Layout, etc...). Granted, maybe "approaching" middle age is baking habits into my neurons, but I just don't see much gain for the pain. (I am no fan of KDE4 Plasma either).
I hope FF know what they are doing. It should help that a browser's command set is simpler than Office's. But, if they are keeping the menus in *nix and OS X anyway, why not leave ribbon/menu as a user preference in Windoze?
"Microsoft debuted its controversial Ribbon interface that it prefers to dub “Fluent” in Office 2003."
I am sure that a tonne of people have pointed this out already but err, didn't the bloody ribbon start with Office 2007?? 2K3 has standard menu bars with a sorta blueish / orangey colour scheme (and kinda rounded) from what I recall.
Please tell me this is a bad dream... I hated the office ribbon, so much so that i'm still using office 2003, i hated it in office, i'll hate it on my web browser. i'be been perfectly happy with my firefox, perfectly happy! *sigh* but now i guess i'll have to start looking for and testing a suitable replacement... this sucks Mozilla... cant you just leave my browser alone?
There are already themes available for Mozilla Firefox that can make it look just like IE7, missing menu bars, combined forward/back button, everything. I can also make it look like Safari on the Mac Aqua interface.
That's the beauty of Firefox. Not only is it themeable, people build themes for it and give them away.
There is no reason for Firefox to overhaul the interface in such a manner if it isn't across the board. Why mess around with cross-platform visual compatibility? As it is now, if I screenshot Firefox running on Windows XP and Linux with GNOME, they look almost identical. That's how it should be. That is what cross-platform apps should strive for.
If they do butcher it down, they should provide a way to bring the menus back like IE does.
Words fail me - horrible, just completely horrible. About the only idea I don't object to is combining the stop and reload buttons.
Combining 7 menus into two - well why not combine them into one and go 1 better than IE? (I'm joking of course). I can't quite work out, should "copy" be under Tools or the Page menu, because it's a tool, and you do it to a page?
I was hoping to leave a comment on the Firefox webpage, but as it seems to involve editing a wiki page instead of just sending an email, I can't be bothered.
If it comes to a browser near me, I'll have to change browsers :-(
I spend half my day trying to find the things that used to be on the menu bars in office programs and vista's bloody explorer bastardisation. Things move when I am trying to click on them, are sometimes where I expect them to be (and where I last found them) and other times not.
Perhaps the interface is fine, and it's too much beer on my part!
Seriously, if the menu bars go, I'll find another browser, and I really like FF, and have used it since it's first release.
Fuck Mozilla. I'm done with them for now. Back to 2 for me.
When someone comes along with half a brain and a team with some design sense won't someone please give me a ring, yes?
I want a browser. A fast browser that renders websites properly. A faster browser that renders websites properly and has an intuitive interface. Also, a nice plugin system and a lowish memory footprint.
That's it. Nothing else.
Fuck you, Mozilla.
I am not a big fan of the ribbon (though I dislike Apple's insistence on retaining the top-of-the-screen menubar a good deal more) but what REALLY gets my goat is 3rd-party applications that diverge from the parent OS UI standards. Camera manufacturers are particularly good at this and I am soooo glad they don't release their crappy file-system-obstificating 'enhancements' for my OS of choice.
While I only use MS-Windows (and MacOS) at work (ie when I am being paid to) I prefer my apps there to have a consistent look and feel for their platform. So Kudos to the Mozilla devs. for acknowledging that, for-better-or-worse, this is how current iterations of MS-Windows look.
The ribbon is about the only thing I like about the recent versions of Office. Now if someone would make it more customizable and allow me to place it at the BOTTOM if the application window instead of the top then I'd be very happy. Then if I could do that with ALL windows I'd be in interface heaven. I have a large screen and it would be helpful if everything was closer to the taskbar. I moved the taskbar to the top of the screen but it doesn't seem right up there.
SM
I am glad to hear that the linux version will dodge that bullet for a while, but its certainly going to appear sooner or later which is bad. OpenOffice is threatening to implement a ribbon liek interface as well, and again after playing with the preview I cannot see the upside to it at all.
The section being quoted is about the direction of applications in general in reference to not showing the menubar. This is used as justification to remove the menubar for Vista and later (under a section about hiding the menubar no less), not about adding Ribbon to Firefox.
See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback#Hiding_of_the_Menubar.
I realised many years ago that many users are clueless, and most menus showed far more things than they were ever likely to use (yet alone understand).
I've been arguing that there should be a simple toggle available between "expert" and "simple" modes in most applications for some time, perhaps this would help address the issue.
Paris, because i'm sure you can guess which mode she'd use.