Talk:Menu cleanup

Bug 322736 (Reorder menus and options to promote tabs more) should be taken into account when planning this for Firefox 4.

-- Frank, 2010.03.17

The Page menu is missing 'View page source code', and 'View page info' or maybe 'Page media'. That's kind-of a big deal to me.

Slightly off topic, it would be swell for the functionality of the 'Media' tab in 'Page info' to be more prominent and support downloading streaming flash media like DownloadHelper for example.

--Daghead 01:33, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

regarding the location of "character encoding": please consider the importance of quick encoding switching for international users, as discussed in Bug 70830 and Bug 240301. the major use case in my experience being webmail.

-- eyal gruss 2009-09-18

Per the "already in the UI" argument, we could remove Cut, Copy, and Paste from the Edit menu and the new Page menu, since they're available from the context menu. We should display the keyboard shortcuts in the context menu though.

-- Steffen 2009-09-15

Yes, but not everyone uses the context menu, so Cut/Copy/Paste is something we can't really kill off. I guess it would be more correct to say "kill off anything that is in the UI and not hidden in a context menu". For the other examples, there are dedicated buttons to do those operations in the UI already, which is why we want to remove them.

— Alex Limi, 2009-09-15

Alex: I am not as sure that so few people use the context menu. Jensen Harris found the reverse to be true: that even novices nowadays use it. Perhaps a user study should be dedicated to this question. If contextual menus are, in fact, commonly used, it would have powerful ramifications for the re-design. Instead of cramming contextual actions into the Page menu, they could be left in the contextual menus—and only there. The result would be a big Hick’s Law win: the Page menu now has fewer items to choose from, and each action can now be found in one and only one location.

This would also allow a cleaner and more logical separation between menus (as I have previously described): the Application menu (whatever it’s called) shows items contextual to the whole Application, the Page menu shows items contextual to the page as a whole, and the context menu shows items contextual to objects under the pointer (selections, images, links, toolbar buttons, etc.).

—David Regev 06:51, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

I know about the Jensen Harris study (and I quote from it all the time too ;), but it doesn't mean that everyone uses the context menu, just that it's the first thing people try on the Windows platform when they don't know what to do, since a lot of the UI design there encourages that behavior.

Think about naïve Mac users — their computers have had one button since the very beginning, and still does — even though they support right-clicking with their new mice and trackpads, it's not the default.

If we're going to make it only appear on the context menu, it would probably only be that way on Windows. I definitely think it's worth considering, but it's also a very risky thing to remove, since it's so commonly used.

The same talk from Jensen Harris also explains why the paste button is so big in Office — it's the most used function by orders of magnitude. :)

— Alex Limi, 2009-09-15

Alex, that’s a great talk. I think the biggest problem with right-clicking in general is that you never know where anything goes. There is too much duplication of functionality, and too little logical separation between where anything should go. And it doesn’t help that the right mouse button isn’t labelled. So, for example, Firefox’s menu for any empty area in the page shows things like Back and Forward and several other items that apply to the page as a whole. It also contains much of the Edit menu but not all of it. This, naturally, leads to a lot of hunting through menus and never having a good idea of where to guess. If a logical separation were strictly enforced, finding the right command would not be as difficult. I think this would be worth exploring solely for the comfort of having real organization. As for Mac users, as you point out, relying on right-click is not a good idea. It would be nice if there were a way to enforce this order there too; perhaps a ‘Selection’ menu could be added in the menu bar.

—David Regev 07:37, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Items on the context menu cannot displace the existence of menu items on a menubar because malicious or otherwise ill-behaved websites can disrupt or break the right-click context menu process, such as with alert() on right-click.

The trend away from menubars is somewhat disturbing. I for one don't use Chrome in part because it has very little functionality, and what little of it there is is hard to access owing to lack of a menubar. The trend away from menubars is a triumph of style over functionality, and I believe the fad will fade over time. A quick Google of "office 2007 menus" indicates that the predominant sentiment is not positive, on the contrary, the overwhelming reaction is antipathy. I do not think FF should make the same mistake as Vista / Win7 / Office 2007.

Barrkel 15:02, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

First, most keyboards have a Menu button. Second, the ability of sites to block right-clicking is a bug that needs to be dealt with somehow. (Aside: Regarding the Office 2007 ribbon, I would recommend you watch the talk to which Alex alluded earlier.) —David Regev 16:19, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I think you should provide the copy-paste-toolset only in the context menu, 'cause duplicate content is bad, always. Never have I seen someone using the Edit-menu to copy something. Most people use Ctrl-C and the rest does use the context menu. The only problem is, as mentioned above, that the context menu may be hidden using JS (and HTML 5 provides the possibility even in markup: context-menus). Solving this problem will be quite complicated: Blocking oncontextmenu fully, as some browsers do, isn't standarts-conformant (bad...). The HTML5 context menu can easily be included in the browsers context menu as described in the spec, but I dunno what to do with the oncontextmenu-Event. Maybe you should provide a message, that the website wants to replace the context menu using the new ideas for notifications. If the user accepts it the page can manipulate the context menu, but the user still has access to it using the Page-button. (Submenu: "Context-menu" or something like that)

Nikic 19:16, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Move Release Notes to About

Along with Moving check for Updates to the About Dialog, we can move Release Notes there too. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=494786

Yup, this has also been discussed/agreed on, thanks for catching it! — Alex Limi

Too much clutter??

The proposed new page and tools menus are bloated, in my opinion.

In the page menu: - Do we really need cut, copy, paste, select all? (I'd like to see some quantitative proof that people still use those in the current edit menu.) - Do we really need undo, redo? - "Find" should be renamed to "Find on page" to be more descriptive and to reduce confusion. - "Full screen" could possibly be moved to the Zoom submenu. - The three Print options should be combined into a click-able submenu, if you understand what I mean. - Developer Tools??? Really?? Devs will probably know about the Alt keyboard shortcut to show the full menubar. Also, Dev Tools in the Page menu?

Tools menu: - "Open file" -- is this necessary? You can always drag and drop a file onto Firefox. - "Clear recent history" should be put in the recent history submenu - Is "Exit" necessary?? There is a giant red close button in Vista/7 for a reason. We don't just have to copy Google Chrome for the sake of coping Google Chrome.

I hope I don't come off as complaining a bunch. I really do love the direction the design is going for Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 on Vista/7. Great job! Hope my suggestions help!

Thanks, -Chris

Expose Keyboard Shortcuts

The actions that are being removed from the menus such as Close tab need to have their keyboard shortcuts exposed in tooltips. So when a user hovers the close button it says "Close (Ctrl+W)" instead of just "Close".

- David Naylor

Bookmarking a page through the menus?

I feel it's not such a good idea to remove the "Bookmark this page" in the menus. Not in the menu bar, and not in the Page Menu. At least not in the former. In my experience, a significant amount of people don't work with the bookmark star (for whatever reason, but mostly because they either don't know what it is, or they don't know you can click it twice) and they use the menu entry instead. Which is a pain in the ass, but those people are also a pain in the ass themselves, so it serves them right.

Anyway, it shouldn't removed because those people may be confused. Or we should figure out a way to make it really obvious that they're supposed to bookmark the page with the star thing.

I'm still apologetic of a "tour", when Firefox 4 is first started, instead of the mildly barren welcome page we have now with the "what's new" and "whatnot".

I would also like to know how a simple user can get involved in helping design the new UI for Firefox 4. I have a few mockups for the in-content preferences panel, but I have no clue who to talk with... --Tiago Sá 14:30, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Work Offline

There is at least one person in the world that uses "work offline" actively.

And I believe there are thousands that use it, mainly in dial-up connections where you pay per minute. Work offline is a great way to browse the pages that were visited in the past. I myself use it for that effect.

I don't think it should be removed from the menus. At least not completely. But I don't think it should be changed at all, because it's a relevant feature for many people (and if the auto-detect may make the dial-up users thing irrelevant, forcing the browser to use the cache instead of the server is not). --Tiago Sá 14:30, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

More elegant solution

Someone posted a mockup that allows this to be handled much more elegantly by not using a standard Windows menu: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups#An_idea_for_the_App_button

With a bit of added creativity you could encompass *all* the current menu options like this. The most used functions could be with large text and icons - easy to find and click. Less used options could be in a sub-menu that you could click saying something like "more" or "advanced" or an additional chevron icon etc.

The cool thing about non-standard menus like this is that you really can be creative with each individual menu item. For example the mockup shows a "zoom" option - as well as having a cascaded "zoom" option as in the mockup you could put little "+" and "-" icons that would zoom directly in and out without having to navigate the cascaded menu. Broccauley 21:15, 5 July 2010 (UTC)