Comments on: No Ribbon Planned for the Firefox UI

By: Funny Love Quotes

Funny Love Quotes — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:35:30 +0000

I think more than merely thinking about the UI (which can be solved to some extend by themes) think about the memory management. I personally have a problem, with firefox not releasing it’s memory.

By: Soft Where

Soft Where — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:56:12 +0000

“Invent” all you want but PRESERVE existing familiarity, PRESERVE existing look and feel, PRESERVE the classic UI etc. What is up with the arrogance of software companies and “developers” throwing away 10+ years of UI familiarity just so they can “invent” something new with just the right shade of baby-blue and screen-wasting fat toolbars (ie. ribbon). I say: learn about usability and UI options please. When designing a user interface PRESERVE existing designs and make the UI fully customizable. UI 101.

By: jocco

jocco — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 01:26:08 +0000

I would like be able to move all menus and tools to the right click context menu.

By: Sean Noble

Sean Noble — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:20:49 +0000

As long as the new right-side menu items and other UI elements can be easily accessed using Alt- keyboard shortcuts, all will be well :)

Of course not having a ribbon is fine – wise choice. A ribbon is correct when there is a large variety of tools that need to be regularly accessed. This is not the case for web browsers.

Good work -S

By: Alan

Alan — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:59:05 +0000

Expanding my post at 45. In Word most of the time you use the ribbons to format text and layout the document. you use a browser to go from web site to site. Turning the bookmarks toolbar into multiple ribbons is absolutely natural for a browser.

If Microsoft get there first I think they will get back a big chunk of the market. To me this is the next big thing in browsers.

By: Alan

Alan — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:42:29 +0000

The plans for a ribbon interface miss the point. The settings and options in Firefox are hardly ever changed. What I want is an Office 2010 style ribbons made up of WEB SITES.
The Backstage and About areas can be used for all Firefox settings. I want to set up menus like News, Finance, Shopping, Food etc.. Each ribbon would be customisable (like Office 2010). There would be sections with web site icons and optional names. I think this would be a Very big win for Firefox. Maybe ribbon view could be an option or extension.

Hiding the menu bar like FX4 is a very bad idea. The developers need to be realistic about users. Do you really think a 6 year old or a 90 year old is going to know about or understand Alt?

My other big gripe about Firefox is everything is too small on a 1920 x 1080 monitor. It looks terrible. I eventually found the about:config parameter layout.css.devPixelsPerPx which works like magic. This option should be on a menu. Again this is probably a case of young developers with good eyesight not understanding some of their users.

By: Stacy Sherrill

Stacy Sherrill — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:21:25 +0000

Alex, if I may quote a most excellent previous blog post of yours, “Notifications and Flow” of March 24, 2009,

“When designing interfaces we often tend to focus on aspects like discoverability and functionality. For instance, if we didn’t place the Web feed glyph in the location bar, how would users be able to discover that they could subscribe to pages?

Indeed! But what you seem to be suggesting is doing away with discoverability, or at least making it more difficult. Certainly this will not impact the FF user already experienced on the new GUI, but it will impact new users to that particular design and to FF in general.

Do you really want to make their ‘introduction’ to a new way of surfing difficult.

In that same article, you discussed as a primary mime the breaking of cognitive flow when attempting to help the user. Unless you are very careful this next design, I think you are going to prevent cognition in the first place.

P.S. Love your work. You should write more often.

By: Elmario

Elmario — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:43:25 +0000

I dont’ really get, what’s up with these GUI Designers! Every of this new and sooo ‘innovative’ GUIs (Office 2007, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Firefox 4.0) tries to be an apple like piece of designershit, givin the look of it 100% priority, while flushing usability down the toilet. WTF? If they continue doing this, I’ll not bee using computers anymore in future – and I’m not what I would call an unexperienced person :(

By: alex.r.

alex.r. — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:46:36 +0000

The problem I have with using these two buttons instead of the menu is that their wording is too generic to be useful and they require too much thought from the user to be useful.

Say I want to print the current page. Well, my printer is some kind of tool I guess, so it might be under there. But it’s also the current page that I want to print, so it might be over there…

And printing is just an example, any action not in the toolbar would require some pause and thought — and since these are things I do once in a fortnight on a browser, you can’t really rely on muscle memory to guide me there.

Hence the consistency with the other applications for which I do print, copy/cut/paste more often is nice, because I can benefit from the muscle memory gathered there and use it on the browser.

By: netrunner

netrunner — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:17:23 +0000

I gotta say I love the odd selective memory people have for the loss of a menu bar. This happened in IE7 first (down to the “Tools,” “Page” buttons), friends, not Chrome.

This has been a long time coming, as has the integration of search bar with address bar. However, Eevee’s comments (#9) are apt – please think carefully about how you are going to arrange/drop the functionality that used to hide in those poorly-designed menus.

Finally, the problem of discoverability (http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20091012-personalWeb/UnifyingSearch_i2.png) is still around. This will be less of a problem once the search engine box is integrated, thus forcing people to treat it as a place to do searching, but that’s not quite enough. For example, when using Chrome I usually tune out all but the web results.