465669 - Consider scaling back the use of menu icons in the Tango theme

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

This bug is to determine if we should consider scaling back the use of menu icons in the Linux Tango theme.  Currently icons are used if the control is available in the toolbar.

Other platforms significantly limit the number of menu items that can have an icon.  For instance, on OS X, icons are only used for locations (Go menu in Finder, bookmarks menu in Safari).  On Vista icons are only used for high frequency tasks in menus, to make them easier to spot (cut / copy / paste in Windows Explorer, "publish movie" in Windows movie maker).

My impression is that the standard for Gnome is still being determined, with some discussion in this bug:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557469

Whatever is ultimately decided for the Gnome interface guidelines we should of course match, but in the meantime we might want to consider scaling back the use of menu icons to only draw attention to commands which we think deserve additional attention.

Comment 1

[Michael Monreal [:micmon]]

Funny, the menu where we could easily do without *many* of the icons is the Bookmarks menus (all those placeholder "HTML" icons...) but this has already been discussed....

Besides that I don't consider Firefox as a "bad" app in this regard. The only other place where I think Fx could to without icons (and still match the current "guideline") would be the tools menu.

Comment 2

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

This is in direct conflict with bug 421423.

Comment 3

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>This is in direct conflict with bug 421423.

Yep, we could use some HIG clarification from the Gnome team.

Comment 4

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Having more items in the menus as 421423 suggests sounds icky.
As mentioned in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557469 we currently don't have any guidelines at all on this (but rather show icons for every menu item the artist had time to draw a icon for), but Matthews suggestion in #1 there sounds like a good idea.

Comment 5

[Michael Ventnor]

I don't find our current use of icons overwhelming and am actually quite comfortable with it. If we were to do anything with this bug, what specific icons would we target?

Comment 6

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

I guess this is somewhat fixed as part of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504275

The new guidelines we decided on is:
"A menu item should have an icon only if it represents a dynamic object such as an application, file, device, or user"

Ie. pretty similar to what Firefox currently does on Windows and OS X.

Comment 7

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>The new guidelines we decided on is:
>"A menu item should have an icon only if it represents a dynamic object such as
>an application, file, device, or user"

Sounds great