Comments on: Menubar Handling

By: Cheyenne

Cheyenne — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:37:50 +0000

Hi,

Just a slightly off topic question… What program do you use to create these wireframes?
I use various programs like axure or illustrator, but it never look as polished as your wireframes. They have some depth and body to it… Very nice!

Thanks for your reply
Cheyenne, the Netherlands

By: J. Couprie

J. Couprie — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:03:48 +0000

The menu bar is very useful to reach a function, suppress it and you discourage many Firefox users.
We have presently an UI that is not perfect but the users have the habit of it, it works, don’t change it drastically : you will break it. I have abandoned Opera for Netscape (and never gone back) due to a release that was too bugged !
You perhaps see no use for the title bar. In most of the applications each screen as a different title bar : it is very useful, when you have a problem and discuss with the hot line to give them the content of the title bar, they immediately see on which screen you are. Also some softwares use the title bar to automatically close bothering advertisement !
Also the title tag is defined in html, if you don’t render it, you will not comply to html standards !
Please add new functions or correct several years old bugs : this is more important for the users that nicer UI (I don’t like ugly UI but this is not the case of FireFox)

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:49:48 +0000

If I were you, I would make them IE style. There’s a very good reason why Microsoft put them there in both Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. It’s all in the Vista/7 UX Guidelines.

By: Michael Kaply

Michael Kaply — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:27:06 +0000

On another note, I actually watched someone use the new Office for the first time the other day.

They had never seen it and wanted to simply put a presentation into fullscreen mode.

It took 2 or 3 minutes and multiple people in the audience trying to figure out how to do it.

Of course it used to be in a very obvious menu. Now it is next to impossible to find.

Let’s not be Microsoft and change things for change sake.

By: Firefox UI evolutiuon

Firefox UI evolutiuon — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:00:09 +0000

[...] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups http://blog.stephenhorlander.com/2009/08/17/menubar-and-toolbar-handling/ http://blog.stephenhorlander.com/2009/08/14/windows-theme-project-progress-report-2/ [...]

By: Jorge

Jorge — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:07:52 +0000

Perhaps you should also consider the tab experiments that were submitted recently to Mozilla in the Re-Design Tabs competition. Most proposals break the usual ‘horizontal tab strip’ concept, some of them going with ‘tabs-to-the-left’, like the Tree Style Tab add-on. Merging those ideas and yours could lead to some different designs.

By: fantasai

fantasai — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:08:04 +0000

Firefox should by default be usable for the broadest segment of the population. I think dropping the menubar defeats this, because for less computer-literate users the menubar is a critical piece of familiar UI infrastructure. It provides a consistent place for things like Open, Save, Copy, Paste, Help, etc. and it provides an organized, compact, and comprehensive place to discover features. I don’t have a problem with making it easier to optimize for people who really want more screen real estate, but I don’t think the default install should drop the menubar.

By: Toe

Toe — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:14:30 +0000

You’re looking at this whole problem the wrong way.

At the time IE7 was released I worked tech support for a major ISP, and I dealt with this change plenty of times.

The problem wasn’t that the menu bar was gone. The REAL problem was that the menu bar was a way to access functionality, and with it gone, there was no obvious way to access a lot of those functions.

Don’t ask “What do we do when the menu bar is turned back on?” That’s not a problem you should even have.

Ask “How do we refine our UI so that there’s NEVER any reason to turn it back on?” Figure out an honest-to-god replacement for the menu bar and be done with it entirely.

By: Blake

Blake — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:49:21 +0000

I think it’d be helpful to clarify the motivations for this redesign. Is the focus:

* Improving the browser’s aesthetic appeal?
* Maximizing web content?
* Retaining existing Firefox users?
* Appealing to new users?
* Appealing to tech enthusiasts?
* Improving the browsers usability? (for which users?)
* Something else?

Ideally we’d be able to accomplish all of these objectives, but inevitably stressing different goals will result in different designs. Personally, I’d like to see the browser improve the speed and ease with which users perform their most common tasks. Overwhelmingly (for me), these are:

* Typing in the URL bar
* Opening and closing tabs
* Going back a page
* Searching

Do we have any data that illustrates Firefox users’ most common browser interactions? I’m a keyboard shortcut addict, but suspect that the large majority of our users are not. With that in mind, I think it’d help to answer the following questions:

* What percent of time do users browse in full screen mode?
* How do users “Go back”?
* How do users open new tabs (control-T, new tab button, menu bar)?
* What percent of users customize their browser?
* What percent of users use bookmarks? How do they bookmark?
* Which shortcuts are most popular? What percent of users employ them?

Answering these question will give us a better understanding of how typical users interact with Firefox and would help inform and improve design decisions. Then again, I’m not a designer and don’t really know what I’m talking about (but would like to learn).

By: DonGato

DonGato — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:27:16 +0000

I think Firefox works pretty well the way it is now. If you want to hide the menubar, just do like it was proposed in the dev-usability list. No need to find new positions and styles. The ones needing the menubar will find it in the same place and the ones that don’t need it will disable it and get rid of it.

I’m on the tabs “on bottom” side because they are related to content and as such they are more accessible when near content and not after navigation and tools. But I have no problem with that being an option. I still think the default should be on bottom.

Microsoft achieved something wonderful with Word 2007. I use it less and less because what I thought at first would be a wonderful and useful change (“the ribbon”) made me lose a lot of time. So I decided to use other tools and I think I will get rid of Word sometime in the future. They even, now, have this change as one of the top requests to revert it (optionally of course). So learn from the biggest software company in the earth by not making the same mistake.