Hiding the Menu bar by default on Vista

[Dao]

From "Top Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience, Rule 10: Clean
up the UI":

"Consider hiding the menu bar if the toolbar or direct commands provide
most of the commands needed by most users. Allow users to show or hide
with a Menu bar check mark option in the toolbar."
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511327.aspx##cleanup)

Simon Bünzli asks, "how a mouse-only user will be able to print a page,
zoom a page or reopen a closed tab in an obvious way". The answer to the
first two examples is toolbar customization (bug 432287 for zoom
controls), and the answer to the latter is the tab context menu. Also, a
mouse-only user could right-click the navigation toolbar and show the
menu bar permanently. Now the question is if these solutions are obvious
enough.

If you have thoughts on this or other questions on the subject, please
add them here.

dao

[Alex Faaborg]

I think the main reason IE decided to kill the menu bar was that the
traditional desktop publishing command structure didn't really make
any sense for an application that isn't based around document creation
(for instance, edit-cut doesn't actually work on the selection). But
they didn't remove all of the functionality, they reorganized it into
two new menus, one about acting on the page, and the other about
acting on the browser (which is a pretty logical distinction). What
was kind of strange is that when Microsoft did this everyone thought
it was awful, but when Chrome did the exact same thing, it was hailed
as fantastic. (Don't forget to put on your brand goggles before
evaluating an interactive design). Either way, my impression is that
the two button distinction makes a lot of sense, and perhaps even more
importantly, people who started with Vista will be expecting this
behavior.

Introducing two new controls, a page button and tools button (or
perhaps "customize" button) would give us external consistency with
the other menu-less browsers on the market. We would probably want to
have them in the same general area as other browsers, so that means
far right of the search bar, or perhaps far right of the bookmarks
toolbar. Having these two controls appear only when the menu is hidden
might seem pretty odd, so perhaps have the two visible on Vista
regardless of if the menu is hidden or not? The top item in the
customize menu would probably need to be ("[ ] menu bar"), so
frustrated users would have a quick way back to oldschool menus,
assuming they poke around enough to find what they are looking for.
Also we would want these two items to be removable and appear in the
toolbar customization palette.

-Alex

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[Simon Bünzli]

Dao schrieb am 15.02.09 02:21:

> "Consider hiding the menu bar if the toolbar or direct commands provide
> most of the commands needed by most users. Allow users to show or hide
> with a Menu bar check mark option in the toolbar."

My concern you cited is with the _if the ..._ which we don't comply with
yet (and neither does the current patch in bug 456535).

> The answer to the first two examples is toolbar customization

Meaning that the user will have to add them himself/herself or that
they'll be added by default? Considering that most of our users never
customize their toolbars, IMHO the former would be unacceptable.

As it stands, it would probably help to first gather information about
which of our menu commands are needed most and should thus continue to
be accessible without customization even with the menu bar hidden, and
then expose them first in the way Alex suggested.

OTOH, if we start going down that route, what would we then need a menu
bar for at all? Instead of adding just yet another way of accessing a
command, maybe replacing the menu bar in a more compact fashion would be
the better solution (and maybe offering the removed top menus as
individual customization options for any toolbar).

Cheers,
Simon

[magnetf...@gmail.com]

Agreed. Put bookmarks and history buttons on the left of bookmarkbar,
and some menu on the right. Then allow the menu to be customised
(right-click - Customise) with Options (in by default), Downloads,
Print (in by default), Add-Ons, Help and whatnot, and you've got no
reason to have a menubar anymore :)

[magnetf...@gmail.com]

On 15 Febr., 17:37, Simon Bünzli <zen...@gmail.com> wrote:

Agreed. Put bookmarks and history buttons on the left of bookmarkbar,

[Zoopaman]

Btw, I don't think that we even need 2 menus, because most of the page-
related stuff (send link, view source, view information) can be
accessed via right-clicking on the page.