139195 - [RFE] View menu shouldn't use a submenu for Show/Hide

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Ken Harris]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:0.9.9+)
Gecko/20020422
BuildID:    2002042203

The View menu has a submenu "Show/Hide", under which all the
toolbars live.  This shouldn't be a submenu: they should be in
the view menu itself.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Moz
2. Pull down the View menu


Actual Results:  Can't see what's available to show/hide: they're in a submenu,
so you have to select View -> Show/Hide -> Personal Toolbar
(for example).

Expected Results:  The items should be in the main menu:

View
   Hide Navigatior Toolbar
   Show Personal Toolbar
   Show Site Navigatior Bar
   Hide Status Bar
   Show Component Bar
   ---
   Show Sidebar
   ---
   Stop
   Reload
   ...

This reduces the mouse-acrobatics to change something, and lets
you see at a glance exactly what's available/turned on.

(Bug 103417 is related: it talks about removing the site nav bar
sub-sub-menu.)

I don't seem to have any applications around that dump Show/Hide
into a submenu: they all just put them in the View menu.

The Mac Human Interface Guidelines don't seem to address menu vs.
submenu, but they do say to use the unambiguous terminology
"Show Toolbar" / "Hide Toolbar" (is that a separate bug?).

If they were all just listed, it'd be 14 items instead of 9, which
I think is still perfectly reasonable.  (Illustrator's View menu is
25 items -- not that it's the example of a perfect app, but even at
14 we wouldn't be anywhere near the longest.)

Comment 1

[Kai Lahmann (is there, where MNG is)]

then the menu could get very long - not such a good idea imho

Comment 2

[Ken Harris]

Why, is somebody planning to add a lot of entries to the Show/Hide
submenu?  Not in any spec I can find...

Comment 3

[Alex Bishop]

I think the commands should indicate the visibility of a toolbar (or whatever)
with a checkmark and not by using 'Show' or 'Hide' (it's easier to tell what's
enabled at a glance and it keeps the length of the menu items consistent).

Comment 4

[Ken Harris]

Ok.  I think I'd be fine with the current checkmark-style menuitems,
if they were in the main View menu.  (Apple's HIG say to use Show/Hide,
but I don't feel very strongly about that one way or the other.)

Comment 5

[Blake Ross]

There are 6 items in this menu by default.  We can't stick them all in the top
level menu or it'd be ridiculously long.  But there's no need to, anyway -- how
often do people show and hide toolbars that they need such quick access?  Not
too often, I'd guess.

Comment 6

[Ken Harris]

There are only 9 items in the main View menu right now; what's the
"ridiculously long" threshold?  I can point to a bunch of common, popular
programs with more than 15 menuitems that are much nicer to work with than
Mozilla because they don't insist of putting everything in submenus.

Does mozilla.org have a UI spec that says how many menuitems may be in a menu?
The File menu has 13, so 13 is ok, but 15 is ridiculous?

IE 5.2 happens to have 15 items in the View menu, including all of the
optional toolbars, right in the main menu.  It's much more pleasant to use
when I'm at a desk with a mouse; when I'm using my laptop away from a desk,
it's virtually impossible to select that submenu with the trackpad (because
it's right below the menubar, I think), so I don't even bother.

When the UI is so hard to use even programmers are avoiding the most basic
features, something's very wrong.

Comment 7

[Blake Ross]

I guess you're using IE on Mac.  I'm using the IE that most of the world is
using (5.0/6.0 on Windows) and the View menu has 11 items, and the toolbars are
in a Show/Hide menu.  If you're showing and hiding toolbars more than, say,
once, ever, you're an edge case.  Feel free to make an .xpi to do this.