Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon 1124
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.
Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. I imagine it'll be called EpiphanyForWindows, WebkitFF3Theme, FirefoxLite, or something similar. Chances are though, that the Firefox project itself will just plough ahead with this stupid idea, and ignore everyone who disagrees. Any project that fixes it is likely to be a third-party effort.
Whatever. I'm just waiting for a stable version of Chrome that has adblock support.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Informative)
There already exists one: http://vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator [vimperator.org]
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. And TFA is taken initially from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback [mozilla.org], which is discussing the direction of *applications* written for Vista and Windows 7 that don't use the menubar, but use a contextual strip (Windows Explorer) or Office Ribbon (Paint and Wordpad). That paragraph is about the rationale for not showing the menubar on Vista and later in Firefox, not on adding a ribbon to Firefox (it is under a Hiding of the Menubar section).
It seems as though a blogger misread this paragraph, and everyone on the interweb has been taking this as fact, without actually RTFOA (Reading The Friendly Original Article).
From the pcpro article referenced in the /. summary:
"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."
From the Mozilla page:
"Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon(now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key."
Note that here they are talking about Vista and Windows 7, not Firefox (and also note the "Many apps ..." bit in the last sentence).
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
It can't be any worse than an inappropriate use of monospaced font on a web site.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Informative)
There actually is: http://www.askvg.com/insert-classic-menubar-and-toolbar-in-microsoft-office-2007/ [askvg.com]
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, on a modern car, with the exception of park and lower gears (which most people STILL don't understand), on an automatic transmission, they don't have control over the shifting anyway. He would probably appreciate the power steering and brakes as well. The driving interface is quite possibly the best user interface I know of, because the basic design hasn't changed since the days of the horseless carriage.
To continue with your car analogy, the switch to the ribbon is like switching a car to a joystick... It might be more intuitive for younger people (who play too much Xbox), but it isn't necessarily the best tool for the job.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>Most people who actually give the ribbon a chance get used to it in about 2 weeks -
Wow. 2 weeks of my life wasted so I could save 1/4 second selecting my command. Yeah. Benjamin Franklin had a saying about that - "Penny wise; pound foolish," to describe people who count pennies but spend dollars recklessly.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
<sarcasm>Yes, I'm sure that's what he meant. You have to spend 336 hours straight studying the Office ribbon before you can use it correctly.</sarcasm>
His point (which I agree with), is that all things being equal, the ribbon is a better interface than the file menu. Of course all things are not equal. You've been practicing on that clunky "Word for Windows" file menu for 15 years. It may take you a little time to retrain yourself. People like myself, on the other hand, don't use Office regularly, and find the new interface much easier to use.
Microsoft is taking a calculated risk to separate themselves from their competitors. I think it was a good decision.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:4, Funny)
Don't get me started with these bad car analogies. I'm still pissed about moving the high beam switch from the floor to a stupid stick on the steering column.
I keep getting my left foot caught in the steering wheel switching to low beams.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Informative)
For an even more recent example, look at the United States and its reasons for not switching to the (clearly superior) metric system.
(Note: I'm a US citizen)
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:4, Informative)
... look at the United States and its reasons for not switching to the (clearly superior) metric system.
Actually, as many historians have pointed out, the US has been "metric" for more than a century now. All the American "Imperial" units of measurement are legally defined in terms of ISO units. Thus, the inch is 2.54 cm because that's the legal definition of the inch. And if you look at the labels on most American goods, you'll find that they include the metric size (weight, volume) of the contents, along with the Imperial size.
I've seen it described as an "extended metric" system, in the same sense that much American industry and marketing uses the term "extended". We have not just meters, centimeters, millimeters, kilometers, etc.; we also have inches, feet, yards, miles, which are also defined as some multiple of a meter. We have all the power-of-ten prefixes, and we also have other really weird multiples for the people who prefer those. So our system is obviously better, right? After all, people who know only metric terms can't easily tell you the length of a(n American) football field, but those who know the additional "yards" unit can.
The problem isn't that the US hasn't "gone metric"; it's that people refuse to stop using the old terms and switch to the metric terms. But hey, we have Free Speech here; the government can't force us to stop talking about inches and feet and force us to talk about meters. That's good, right?
Well, at least it's good for the marketers, who can present us with a confused mess of bizarre units, and make it very difficult for us to compare prices of goods. Take a good look at the price/unit labels in most grocery stores, if you don't know what I mean.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>people are bitching about Microsoft not maintaining backards compatibility...
Well I've tried and failed multiple times to make Wing Commander operate on Microsoft and failed spectacularly...... but never mind that. - Improvement is only an improvement if the overall usage is improved. Yeah I know you're probably thinking "No shit sherlock", but that basic idea is something many people overlook.
The current interface presents a nice CLEAN list of commands, which can be quickly and easily scanned. The new ribbon interface presents a confusing mess of pictures and words that make a "quick scan" very difficult. It's the computer equivalent of tacking an organized library, and just randomly tossing books everywhere. Yes the books might be neatly arranged, but they are still random to the eye, and finding the book you want becomes very difficult.
Put the books/menu commands back in a nice, serial order so the human eye can scan and find what it's looking for.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO the office ribbon bar is the menu system for office finally done right.
will it work in FF? I don't know.
More annoying than this is as of FF 3.5 you can now longer kill the instance if you close the last tab.. Instead it is noop or blank, that's fucking annoying!!!
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also difficult to describe to another person on the phone. That can matter because some of us poor suckers have to provide telephone tech support to people and stuff.
At least with a classic text menu you can say, "See the menu bar? Now click on File, then Print, etc.." Its a whole lot easier with words up there.
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:4, Interesting)
The current interface presents a nice CLEAN list of commands, which can be quickly and easily scanned. The new ribbon interface presents a confusing mess of pictures and words that make a "quick scan" very difficult.
Yeah, but there's a trade off here. In the old office menu system, you'd often find what you're looking for buried in a menu somewhere with a half-assed dialog box to go along with it. Sure, you could scan each menu every time fairly quickly, and it was easy on the eyes. But once you found what you were looking for, repeating the path there really sucked.
One thing the new system does get right is that everything now has a keyboard short cut and everything is supposedly quicker to get to with less mouse acrobatics. The only reason you're used to the menu system is you've been trained since windows 95 to get good at navigating menus so you don't notice anymore.
I'm sure if you took two people, started one up with a ribbon, started the other with a menu, and then switched them after about a year, they'd both immediately complain. But that's obvious. The real question is after a month or so of training and learning, who will be performing better and is that performance change (if any) worth it?
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
Haven't we had that argument a couple of times here already? Anyway : the reason you had trouble with it is not because it isn't intuitive, it's because you're very fluent with and accustomed to the old UI.
Don't think so, it violates quite a few basic rules of UI design. I know there are issues with the old 7+/-2 rule, but a higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of non-intuitive icons is hard to search, it takes more screen real-estate than necessary, and is hostile to touch typists who don't want to have to keep moving their hand from keyboard to mouse and back (Alt-F S has become Alt H F D F -- double the keystrokes).
Re:Summary of /. Reaction to Proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
>>>gt wth th txtng genrtn. & no i wnt gt off yr lwn
Shakespeare is dat u? I lovd ur ply. "O Romeo, denie thy Fathr: Vnto the white vpturned wondring eyes; Of mortalls that fall backe, When he bestrides the lazie puffing Cloudes, And sailes vpon the bosome of the ayre."
Brllint!
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Informative)
Hahaha what? Firefox's UI is by far the slowest of all major browsers. Layout is specified in XML and loaded dynamically every time it's needed. XUL is one of the most embarrassing aspects of Firefox. I don't think even a ribbon could make things any worse than they already are.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad, everyone knows there is no alternative, only XUL.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
There is no Dana, only XUL.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Insightful)
Even MS understood this with Win7, where they made the overall UI responsiveness faster, even if the actual things are still loading.
They understood it a lot further back than that. In Windows 95, the foreground window thread automatically ran at a higher priority than background window threads.
(Heck, Windows has pretty much _always_ had one of the most responsive UIs.)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
> (Heck, Windows has pretty much _always_ had one of the most responsive UIs.)
(grabs paper towel to wipe Diet Mountain Dew from the display... AFTER blowing as much as possible from nose once the coughing stopped)
Windows has always had one of the easiest-to-hang UIs (with the possible exception of pre-OSX MacOS and PalmOS) of any modern OS, thanks to Microsoft's retarded architectural philosophy of putting the application in charge of managing its own UI effects and redrawing itself on demand. It's why a badly-written Win32 app can't be minimized, usually can't have its window moved, might swallow its mouse pointer, and needs ctrl-alt-delete to be involuntarily killed. It allows the consequences of that braindamaged app to spread beyond the application itself, and affect the working of every OTHER running application, too.
It's why a 20+ year old Amiga running at 7.16MHz had a UI that was, in many ways, more responsive than Windows running on a 3GHz quadcore i7. Intuition (the Amiga's window manager) was completely indifferent to the state of running applications. If you clicked a close gadget, it XOR'ed the nanosecond you clicked the button, and returned to normal the moment you released it. The app itself might have crashed beyond repair 20 minutes earlier, and the gesture might achieve nothing besides the visual indication of a close-gadget click, but at least there was zero doubt in your mind that the click was made. If you saw the colors invert, and the app didn't close, you knew INSTANTLY it was hopeless, and just cycled the power. There was no "did Windows see my mouse click?" ambiguity.
Ditto, for window moves. If an app died a horrible death and froze, you could still move the window, and its contents obediently moved right along with it. The hardware didn't care... bitmap bits were bitmap bits. You could cover and uncover the window, and it looked exactly like it did before. Unlike Windows, Intuition genuinely didn't *care* whether the app was still working. It did its thing, and got out of the way. Compare that to Vista, XP, and just about everything since the invention of Active Desktop... where you might not even be able to show the Start menu for ~45 seconds if something in a web page being requested by FIREFOX (an app completely unrelated to Windows) or IE causes a fractured DNS lookup to hang Explorer's stupid, brain-damaged single-threaded name resolver that gets used for everything from DNS lookups to figuring out the meaning of "C:\" It's not *quite* as bad under SMP as it used to be with a single core/CPU... but it still happens, and it's still incredibly annoying when it does.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Informative)
Hurray for people not reading TFA:
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Informative)
Ew, that's one of the worst things I found about the UI of IE7. If you accidentally touch the alt key, or you start to press an alt-something keyboard shortcut and change your mind, *everything* jumps around as the menubar jumps into existence.
If you want a menu bar to become visible, put it in front of something else that you aren't going to use at the same time. Making the whole UI of the application jump around and re-render is really annoying.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Interesting)
However, I will believe this change when I see it.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
You know what you are?
You're a ribbon bully!
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point. However, Microsoft Bob was also the result of advanced research into user interface design. So was Clippy. Microsoft has a way of taking very innovative ideas and stripping them of all sanity and usefulness.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Funny)
No...the problem is the focus group is composed of people who's forehead sticks out
First off, the word you are looking for is "whose". Second, you should have said "foreheads stick out", assuming these "people" you speak of have more members than just you.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
The kind of feedback you are talking about is useful for tweaking a UI, not for coming up with a novel UI concept to begin with. The kind of 'advanced research' I'm talking about is the sort of stuff that came up with the concepts in the first place. You may want to read some of Brenda Laurel's publications on human/computer interaction, that was the stuff that got bastardized into Bob and Clippy. The idea for the ribbon interface also came out of university research, not Microsoft's labs.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
I already dislike the new gui for firefox on the mac (why in the world does the back button need to be so big?), and use safari because of it, but on linux I use FF all the time. I guess I'm going to sit back and hope that midori [twotoasts.de] is released soon, or use konqueror.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because they hate change, not because the Ribbon is a worse UI.
Basically, their opinion has nothing to do with:
1) Whether the Ribbon is a better or worse UI
2) Whether they are more productive with the Ribbon than without it
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that those Excel users who marked "hate it" are more productive using it. I know I am, and I consider myself a pretty advanced Excel user. (Of course, I'm also open-minded and don't have a problem with change.)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who has been using Excel 2007 for months and estimates their productivity has taken a sizeable drop isn't a advanced or intermediate user. I can respect the view that 2007 is less intuitive (even though I disagree) but it is plain bollocks to say it is slower once you know how to use it (and an advanced user is capable of learning new methods ffs).
When I hear morons talk about muscle memory in Excel I know they don't understand what an advanced user is. Did ANY advanced user actually grab the mouse and click on a menu option rather than using one of the numerous keyboard shortcuts?
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it depends on the definition of "advanced user". If it means "most efficient", you're right. If it means a user that creates complex spreadsheets, who knows?
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
And the third funny thing is that there's simply no way any "advanced Excel user" would, or COULD switch to Linux, because OOo can't do as much as Excel can.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a hardcore Sony fan and never even held an Xbox controller, but having recent picked up an Xbox 360 I have to say I LOVE the controller. The PS controllers now feel clunky and just ergonomically wrong.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
Hah! True, but the theory behind Bob and Clippy is pretty advanced. It came from Brenda Laurel's analysis of human/computer interaction. Not from Melinda French's... sorry, my mind is simply refusing to imagine Bill Gates in a sexual situation.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
However Ribbon's "contextual" system is horrible to user too. People get used to where things are, even more so with computers. That is why static, normal menus and buttons are good. When the system is trying to contextually offer the "best" options to user, in seemingly random places it thinks are most relevant, they just get confused.
I use browser and I I've learned where things are. I know better myself what I'm looking for than some algorithm that will just mix things up.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that once you have learned menus in one app you can apply much of that to the next.
Computers are complicated because they are complicated.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Informative)
There is no "algorithm" in the ribbon, unlike in earlier (menu driven!) versions of Office.
Unlike the menus in, say, Office XP or Office 2003, where some items were "hidden" until you used them, in the ribbon EVERYTHING is there. It doesn't try to "adapt" to you. Sure, you have to re-learn where a lot of stuff is, but that was often the case before the ribbon came out as well (because more features kept getting squeezed into a menu-driven UI that just wasn't made for a program with that many options).
The only thing that changes in the ribbon are some contextual tabs that show up at the end, e.g., when you have selected a picture or a table. These tabs are meaningless normally, so they are hidden. But they don't re-arrange themselves based on your usage patterns - they are static and don't change.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently Microsoft thinks otherwise - and they have hard data from the actual clickstream of Excel users. The whole reason they introduced the ribbon (and got rid of the awful UI "improvements" of Office XP and 2003) was that (a) other than the top 10 commands, everyone uses a different subset of Office functionality, and (b) the top 10 feature requests were already in Office. Everyone thinks Office is bloated, but just like pork-barrel politics, everyone means something different by "bloat".
Office had already grown way past the point where you could discover a feature by reading all the menus; that's why they tried Personalized Menus and Task Panes and all that. According to Microsoft's data, the ribbon is more discoverable than the old UI - though obviously it requires relearning, and thus rediscovering a bunch of functions all at once.
That said, Firefox clearly doesn't have the massive command vocabulary of Office, and I can't imagine there are any Firefox features that were too hard to find via menus. This seems more like copycatting.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Another important thing to remember that menus hide unused and rarely-used features. In most modern software that's actually a pretty good thing, as very few people need or want to leverage every single feature of an application in one session. It makes it harder to discover those features, but once you learn where they are the first time around, it's a solved problem. By presenting the user with large blocks of mostly unwanted toolbars, the ribbon scheme steals valuable vertical space without offering any usability savings over the initial discovery. You still have to switch between ribbon states to find half the features you want, and select from drop-down lists of icons insted of drop-down menus of options.
This will mesh better with Microsoft's vision of a modern application, for what that's worth. It might make some features easier to discover (I know people who are still surprised to learn about Firefox's keywords feature). Even so, I doubt it will be more popular than the current design, lead to significant changes in the way people use Firefox's features, or be worth the loss of valuable vertical real-estate. The only good thing I can say about it is that most people don't need to use menus in Firefox as it is, and the ribbon can probably be hidden like the URL bar, menu bar, and toolbars can already be hidden.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I have with the ribbon, and the reason I'll download an add-on to replace the menus in Firefox or just switch to Safari, is that it's a disorganized mess, with everything getting roughly the same amount of visual play. Worse still, some things get more play just because they take more space to show.
With the menu, some things may be buried a few levels deep, but at least it's highly organised and I can quickly figure out where to find things using common sense. In the long run this works out much better for me. Maybe it's different for users who are just encountering a computer for the first time or something.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually I specifically meant to refer to situations where I don't know how to perform the task in question. With the menu bar I can quickly figure it out. With the ribbon I am flipping things in and out, trying to find something that seems relevant, wasting vast amounts of time waiting for tooltips to appear on undecipherable icons.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive. There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
The way things "should be done" is the way people want them to be done and are used to them being done.
All this "intuitive" BS is nonsense. What is "intuitive" about looking at a screen and picking something off a "ribbon" at the top of a bar over a bunch of text and images? There's nothing in human instinctual behavior that would guide that. We know to do something like that because we have learned how to do it.
And there is just no reason to have to learn a new system when we have all already learned how to use menus. I still can't get anything done beyond the most basic tasks in Word because of the stupid ribbon, and I've basically given up on the whole app because of it. I used to use it for everything, now I use it as a last resort - I use Wordpad for most other things that I can't use Notepad for. (My version of Wordpad still has menus; I didn't realize there was a version with the ribbon. Now I know to avoid it.)
You know what I wish people would stop doing? Assuming I'm too dumb to use menus, but smart enough to learn a whole new system that I've never seen before. And I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
The way things "should be done" is the way people want them to be done and are used to them being done. Bull....to an extent. Intuitive means it behaves in a way that you can reason out, that is natural. CLIs for instance are not intuitive, there is no real world example of CLI
The other reply has mentioned natural language.
I read a study where some old people were taught how to use a computer (some Linux distro) using the CLI for most tasks. Most of them quickly understood the give command/get response paradigm, one said it was like talking to a child -- you had to be precise and specific, and exactly what you asked for would be done.
Think remote controls, all buttons are in front of you, at best there is an +10 on the remote.
The meanings of the buttons changes according to what's on the screen. My grandma doesn't like her new TV, it has "too many buttons". This isn't an interface we should replicate.
Or consider a more organic approach, at a grocery store you dont have to push fruit out of the way to get to the vegetables to get to the potatoes. You go to the produce isle and head for the potatoes right in front of you.
File -> Save
Produce -> Potatoes
Looks like a menu to me. (Salads -> Potato, on a dinner menu -- that's why it's called a menu!)
having them memorize a menu system is not useful.
You don't need to memorise a menu system, that's the whole point. The options you have are grouped according to their function, if you want to change the text colour try the "Formatting" menu, etc.
With a toolbar the minimum is to learn what each picture means, and this is significant. Grouping the icons is essentially making menus without text.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
table@diningroom:~ $ mv salt seat1 seat3
Expected magic word not found.
table@diningroom:~ $
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
table@diningroom:~ $ sudo mv salt seat1 seat3
Salt move successful.
table@diningroom:~ $
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Informative)
Good thing that the ribbon takes up the exact same amount of space as the old toolbars and menu did, then: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx [msdn.com]
The document viewing area by default in Word 97 and Word 2007 is literally the exact same, except 2007 actually gives you slightly more space horizontally. PowerPoint is the exact same. The only significat difference is that you do lose a row with Excel, but as someone who works with Excel on a daily basis, I'd gladly take the ribbon over the menu any day. Additionally, you can collapse the ribbon (double-click a tab or hit Ctrl+F1) to save space. I'd guess this would save at least as much space as collapsing the old two-row Word toolbar into one, if not more.
Space, my friend, is not an issue. (Not to mention that Mozilla isn't really going to the "ribbon," anyway, but that's another story.)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Informative)
The link you are probably looking for is this one:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/11/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible.aspx [msdn.com]
It's a link to Jensen Harris's Office 2007 blog, where he collects all the articles he wrote about the Office 2007 UI (the "ribbon"), explains WHY it is the way it is, provides (IMHO) rather insightful comparisons against the old menu & toolbar paradigm, and generally does a good job of explaining why they chose the ribbon over the "status quo" of toolbars and menus.
That said, a ribbon-based UI is not always the answer - like toolbars and menus, it can be abused by people who don't think UI design through carefully enough, but it is a clever and intuitive answer to "option overload."
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
But they DID want those features!. MS realised users didn't find the functionality when they asked for functionality that was already in Office since long ago. The Ribbon was their take on trying to solve that, and personally I think they are on the right track,
Anyway, this whole discussion seems bit unneccessary since I cannot find anywhere on mozilla.org where they say they will use the ribbon, they do however give some examples of how they think future firefox will look and whgile it's not the ribbon, it quite pretty, although one can see they looked quite a lot at Chrome and ie 7/8:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback [mozilla.org]
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability.
True, since large menu hierarchies like those found in Office 2003 may end up as cumbersome and hard to find what you're looking for.
But simple applications like Firefox do not actually suffer from this problem, and I think MS only did this in Windows 7 for Paint and WordPad to showcase their new Ribbon API in Windows 7, much like WordPad was earlier written in MFC to exemplify the MFC C++ library on MSDN.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, IMHO. :-(
Guess why MS isn't releasing the bulk of their apps using the Ribbon UI?
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Informative)
But simple applications like Firefox do not actually suffer from this problem
Which is why Firefox isn't adding Ribbon. They're just remaking their interface to work more like IE8 (in that menu bar is hidden by default, but shows if you use Alt to activate it). Please have a look at the actual screenshot [mozilla.org], and I dare you find any resemblance of Ribbon there. Also read the actual primary source [mozilla.org]. The only place where it even mentions Ribbon is this bit:
Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon (now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key.
which is not a statement of intent regarding Firefox, but rather an assessment of the present state of affairs in Windows UI design guidelines. Where TFA has gotten the idea that Firefox will have "Office 2007's Ribbon", I don't know, but it's simply bullshit.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability.
This is actually a point of contention among usability engineers.
The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive.
Intuitive is a rather subjective term. Rather the question is how learnable it is and how functional.
There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
The learning curve for new interfaces can be problematic. Any change will meet some resistance. MS's ribbon will probably meets more than most because of vocal minorities and because the coupled it with a switch that temporarily eliminated some features. So power users of Word were frustrated partly by a new interface but also because they assumed they could perform a task and the interface was preventing them, when in truth the task had become impossible coinciding with the new interface.
Putting features in front of the user rather than 3 to 4 deep in a menu system is far more intuitive.
The problem is if the needed feature is in front of the user and determining what is needed where. If a menu system is more than three levels deep, you've failed as a UI designer.
In fact I think the office ribbon layout is due to a massive amount of consumer research on Microsoft's Behalf.
The consensus I've seen seems to be that it is based off of the the U of W's Decision-Theoretic UI project, but where MS was unable to get it to work properly so they scrapped the fundamental adaptive nature and just kept the UI style. The underlying concept resulted in mixed results for UI designers in the first place, so maybe that isn't too terrible and the design of the elements they copied were at least sensible and obeyed fundamental principals of UI design.
MS does not seem to have published their usability testing (if they did it and followed the results which is always a question with MS) but have published PR pieces claiming that user studies show improved usability; of course not publishing that underlying study either. Scholarly works to date seem to contradict their claims, but some of those were a little less than methodical in implementation. I think MS managed to piss a lot of people off and introduce a new UI scheme which is questionable but not terrible in and of itself.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Insightful)
Many users see the alt key combos on a menu and know how to use them for things they need the most, so they don't even need the menu. My wife used to be surprised when I would do something without the mouse, like bold an Excel cell, and then she would try it herself and often comment on how much easier it was.
The ribbon bar does offer more capability for displaying options than a menu does, but it takes up more space -- it's HUGE when compared to a menu. Why they don't offer a 'small icons without text' option I don't know. It does provide a better interface for people who aren't afraid to click on something to see what it does. Which is the minority of computer users.
For the minuscule amount of time it might save later, it's all lost while spending minutes trying to find out there the 'Pivot Table' option is now (it used to be under the data menu, but they moved it to the insert ribbon). But Microsoft and Apple are all about dumbing down the computer so any moron can use it without any skills or knowledge. Just point and click. That's why Grandma can't find files after she downloads them, she has no clue about what computers do, how they work, or what file systems or directories are. It's not that she isn't capable of learning, it's that it's all hidden and she can't find out even if she wanted to. I'm always amazed at people who have used computers for years and have no concept about files and directories, the very basis for almost all programs on a computer. Instead, they use organizers that put files who-knows-where, then they get all upset when they run out of space because the 'C' drive is full and they can't figure out how to put new files on the new hard drive I just installed.
I don't mind offering the ribbon bar as an option for the new user, or for those that truly like it better. But if Firefox or Office is already installed, please keep the old settings and then ASK me if I want to change to the new ones. It would be really nice to have something that says 'You've been using ribbons for a couple of days now, want to make it permanent?' rather than hiding the option to change it 12 layers deep behind some obscure reference.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
Let's hope they have!
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
It really isn't about the elements that they use but how they implement it.
Ribbons for some apps can greatly improve the UI.
Menus for other apps can do the same.
Bad Ribbons can make things really bad.
So can bad Menus.
I like to compare Ubuntu vs. OS X.
Ubuntu has all the GUI tricks and a lot more then OS X. However OS X still gets praises for being an excellent UI outside the Linux Zealot range even outside the Mac Fanboy range. Why because Apple spent a lot of time, much more the most Open Source Projects dedicate to. For using the right element to portrait the right job.
Now Firefox is going to use Ribbons. Ill wait until I see if before I pass judgement.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line is that I hate having tools move around when I use them
In fact when I develop applications now I disable contextually useless items but not hide them so the user does not waste time looking for a tool they shouldn't be using.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Informative)
Gone are the menus that go halfway down the screen. Gone are the submenus nested three layers deep.
True, but the issue here is that Firefox do not even suffer from these problems.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that drives me nuts about Office 2007's menu is that I'll use a function on something, then move to a different part of the document and discover that the function I just used is gone, even though it would still be valid. Then I'm forced to flip through the various ribbon tabs to find the function on a different ribbon that looks different and has slightly different options (oh, this one has blue and grey instead of blue and pink for some reason). It drives me nuts. I'm forever hunting around on the stupid ribbon for wherever the function I want wandered off to.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:4, Insightful)
They also have context-aware ribbons, such as picture and table editing which appear and hide themselves only when you are working on that specific object.
This is a horrible idea, because users frequently do not understand the different context modes. Wheras with menus, the commands are consistent in both placement and appearance, but can still be context-sensitive. Inactive commands do not disappear, but are dimmed. Users can see that the command is still there, but not available, and are not left hunting madly through tabs for a command that they swore was right there a minute ago....
Parent is Spewing Astroturf (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod parent down.
The ribbon system allows for the logical grouping of actions by function.
What, exactly, is logical about the Home ribbon in Excel then? SMASHED in with cut/paste is formatting and sorting. None of which are particularly clue-ful or present any sense of order whatsoever.
How come there isn't a 'File' tab with lots of file functions smashed together?
In addition, every common action can be performed in two mouse clicks or less: one to select the ribbon governing what you would like, and one more to select the specific action.
Opening a file? at least three clicks. Printing? three clicks. Sorting? At least two, probably more clicks for most sorts. Data activities? Three clicks at least. Stop spreading misinformation
I'll give you the undo/redo buttons conform to your claims, and there is 'buttonizing' of some things that Microsoft probably had complaints about, but as broadly as you make your claims they are materially false.
Please, don't change the scope of your sweeping declarations in order to for your claims to approximate truthiness.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Insightful)
You sound like a Microsoft developer I curse everyday. For those who actually have to be productive ie those of us in Finance Excel 2003 works great. Everyone knows where everything is and has modified the menus and buttons to make them more productive. Of course, the Ribbon is not for the power user its for the user who has no idea what they want thus its geared towards the lowest common demoninator ie the secretary or grandma. Anytime I have to drop into 2007 I lose 30 - 40% of my productivity because things that were one or two clicks away you have to first find then you are 4 - 5 clicks. Ribbon is just another word for unproductive mess.
Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score:5, Funny)
Its the most assinine user-unfriendly POS I have seen since vi.
So your worst nightmare is that Microsoft will one day introduce MS Linux with, say, ribbon-enabled MS Vi 2012?
How time flies (Score:5, Insightful)
I had no idea it was April already.
Please, don't do it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear god, no (Score:3, Insightful)
Why take away a perfectly good, easy to use menu and replace it with that shit-tastic ribbon concept?
Repeat after me, (Score:4, Insightful)
I can understand having it as an option for those few people who actually like the ribbon (which, IMHO reduces usability, while taking up way more space), but forcing that garbage on the general public seems like a waste of both energy and goodwill.
Re:Repeat after me, (Score:5, Informative)
It is an option.
"Though it will be turned on by default for Windows 7 and Vista users, they will be able to toggle between the old and new interface by holding the Alt key."
Windows-only? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's some argument to be made that Firefox should fit in to Windows, if that's where it's running.
My question is, will this abomination also be applied to other OSes?
Ribbon sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Menus exist for a reason (they are useful and organized), and the "Ribbon" takes up more space than the menus. The Ribbon's "Contextual" interface just means that things aren't in the same place all the time. It means that action A is not always in action A's spot, and sometimes action B is in action A's spot. It's just terrible. I guess that's the last I'll be using of Firefox.
Ecchhh... (Score:3, Interesting)
I despise the ribbon more than MS itself. What is it in the human psyche that insists on breaking things that work? There are so many other issues to address -- why screw up a perfectly usable user interface, by replacing it with an illogical hodge-podge that, if nothing else, requires user retraining? What problem is being solved? And is it really being solved?
If you don't believe me, ask a collection of users to perform a task with the existing UI, then change to the ribbon and repeat the process. If not convinced, give the users a week to adjust to the ribbon, and repeat the test. I think you'll find that users burdened by the ribbon will perform their tasks significantly slower than those using the more efficient menu system.
why??? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, a web browser doesn't need that many context sensitive too bar elements. Chrome, Safari and even IE 8 already has a very simplified and usable tool bar (with one or two drop down menus for more detailed options - hardly requiring a ribbon).
i just don't really get this...
Re:why??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Neat! (Score:4, Funny)
No, wait, I mean that other thing -- lame!
Clever. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's really clever. The Ribbon is fully available to any application that doesn't compete with Office... I would have never thought about a web browser as being within that fold, but it most certainly is. IE is not part of the office ecosystem. This is smart move towards integration and a clever way to utilize the platform. However, there likely will be some backlash from purists. Might I suggest a branch of Firefox not unlike Camino for Mac? Perhaps a Windows-centric version of the Mozilla browser would be in order to better provide for the range of needs and interests in the community.
The Office 2007 ribbon is very effective for exposing contextual functionality, but it's also capable of being a lightweight interface. I am curious to see how Firefox implements this. I wouldn't anticipate it being nearly as wide open as Office's ribbon, with much of its functionality likely hidden in the globe.
Alongside some Windows 7 integration, these features could go far towards making Firefox more of a native browser and less of a competing visual element in Windows.
Re:Clever. (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting. My only experience with a ribbon-style interface is in a technical program that just upgraded to it (I'm still in XP and office 03). So far, it's been utterly confusing and ridiculously unproductive. Commands which were second nature now require direct attention to find. I've resorted, in some cases, to looking up the keyboard shortcuts in the manual so that I can avoid having to hunt through the ever-shifting menus.
I can see how the interface might be useful to someone who has never run the program before - it limits your selections to the immediate, common tasks. For the experienced user, though, it slows down the process. If time is money, it's a very costly interface.
I would generally agree with that research. (Score:5, Interesting)
I fully expected to hate that damn ribbon, but the reluctant truth is that I find the more I use it the more generally useful it becomes -- especially for exposing semi-obscure but useful Microsoft Word features (like creating cross references). Still, there's a catch. When it doesn't work it falls flat on its face and you spend the next three hours trying to figure out how to do something that should only have taken 5 minutes.
Can they actually do that? (Score:3, Interesting)
It was my understanding that the ridiculous license Microsoft chose for the "Office Ribbon" prevented competitors from using the office ribbon concept unless they paid a hell of a lot of money up front. Does that apply only to competitors of Office? That seems remarkably narrow-sighted for Microsoft's contract lawyers.
I assume the Linux versions of Firefox will continue to use the "messy" menus.
In Related News... (Score:5, Funny)
Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon
Many To Replace Firefox With Opera
the haters won't notice, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The screenshot [pcpro.co.uk] 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.
What contexts are there? (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
This story is 800% bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
"Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon(now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key...Firefox isn't the type of application that necessarily has contextual actions in the same way Windows Explorer does. So how to handle the functionality of the menubar if it is hidden?"
They are just using the ribbon as an example of an interface that has eliminated the menu bar. If you read further they have mockups of the 3.7 and 4.0 interface, it looks absolutely nothing like the ribbon.
Look and Feel has become the OS (Score:5, Insightful)
GNOME has a HIG that they really would love for everyone to follow. You're not forced to but, you can almost spot the applications that don't follow the GNOME HIG. That makes up a lot of the look and feel, add Ubuntu's wonderful brownish / orange; Fedora's blueish; or SuSE's green everywhere and you have a look and feel that screams the distro's GNOME.
Microsoft has the Aero glass and wonderful (*snicker*) ribbon. Microsoft is slowly getting everyone on the glass and ribbon theme. There is no absolute rule that you must use glass and ribbon styles on your Microsoft application, but people notice when it doesn't match up. It gives Microsoft that Post-XP look and feel.
In the end, operating systems are trying to make a look that defines them, that people can easily recognize. Much like Google has their own look and feel of blue and flat that they've got going on. People identify readily with a unique look and feel and that is, in a nutshell, cheap advertising. There is nothing wrong with developers not going along with the look and feel an OS uses, Winamp comes to mind as a big one, but it automatically points out that the user is using something different, something not part of the OS; and if the OS is using a really slick look and feel with all kinds of neat effects, not going with the OS look and feel makes you look dated, or posing (if you're trying to do your own slick look and feel effects.)
For 90% of us here on Slashdot, this is all just a bunch of useless eye candy. However, it's a real important factor for the other whatever percentage of the general population who just buy into marketing hype.
Chrome looks out of place on Windows sans the glass effect. It looks like a giant blue rubber browser. However, that doesn't mean that it is silly, just looks exactly not like a Windows Vista/7 application. We can debate the merits of looking like a Windows application till the cows come home, point being it looks out of place.
Whatever your take is on the ribbon UI, I won't argue you there, but that's where Microsoft looks like they're heading for general UI, just like Mac OS X puts the menu bar at the top of the screen. It's just part of that look and feel and companies are very geared to have a distinct look and feel so that people can instantly recognize that the product in use.
So are we going to toss stones at Mozilla for actually going the with the look and feel of a Windows program, when they try to achieve the same on Mac OS X and Linux? I think the better answer for all the people who are heading down to the rock quarry is: If you do not like the glass/ribbon look and feel, maybe you should change to an OS that matches the way you want it to look?
I can almost hear the angry replies, but I will say this in my defense. The look, feel, and usability of a given OS is a marketable thing. I ditched Windows when I saw what they were going to do with Windows post-3.11. I couldn't stand it, but I understood that this was the way Microsoft was going (start buttons, browser like file navigation, etc...) I can not fight a war with a company that is trying to market stuff. So, I switched to an OS where I could dictate how things are going to work, Linux. I've not looked back since.
We just need to understand that Mozilla is bringing their application to look like a Microsoft application, just like they did with the Linux version of Firefox when they added GTK+ integration. Just like they are trying to do with making Firefox look like a Mac OS X program. So, come on, if you don't like the direction MS is taking with their look and feel, stop waiting for more applications to break ties with the Microsoft look and feel. Instead, switch over to an OS that matches what you want. It's not that hard really, and after a few weeks, you won't notice the difference. Let's make peace, not cast stones.
Re:Mac. (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:How about an original thought? (Score:5, Funny)
I'll wait until the obvious font problem is fixed.
Re:This is how Microsoft wins, kids (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the problem: while KDE and Gnome are strongly influenced by the interface introduced with Windows 95, were there any real decent alternatives that could be easily picked up by "newbie" end users? The windowing interfaces you saw on SGI and Sun workstations in the late 1980's and early 1990's weren't paragons of ease of use.
We forget that Microsoft has spent a HUGE amount of money in their Usability Lab doing nothing but studying how user interfaces work for computer programs. That's why Windows has a generally pretty consistent interface on the surface, and someone used to Windows 95 could fairly easily pick up learning and mastering even Windows 7.