579176 - Move the Add-ons option to the top level of the Firefox button

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

There are a number of complaints that users cannot find the Add-ons option in the new Firefox menu. I think it would be better to move this to the top level.

Comment 1

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

I second this.  In the UX design discussions we talked about the importance of having this button at the top level.  According to the Test Pilot menu study, Add-ons Manager is one of the most clicked items in the menu - partially because it has no primary UI button.  It's useful that it can be brought up in 2, rather than 3, clicks.

Comment 2

[u88484]

Alex/Beltzner: What do you two think about adding the the Add-ons option to the top level of the Firefox button instead of being nested under the Customize submenu?

Comment 3

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

Yep, hitting "customize" is supposed to launch the add-ons manager, similar to how hitting "print" prints the page: http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/07/18/details-about-the-firefox-button/

Comment 4

[u88484]

That is confusing then since selecting customize on the menu bar and in the context menu on toolbars both bring up the customize panel.

Not a big deal since these are just mockups but your latest mockup i4 also shows a separate entry for Add-ons under the Customize submenu.  Is that correct?

Comment 5

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

>Not a big deal since these are just mockups but your latest mockup i4 also
>shows a separate entry for Add-ons under the Customize submenu.  Is that
>correct?


Yeah, the top menu item of every sub-menu carries out the same command as hitting the main menu item.  This is to expose the keyboard shortcut, and just in case the user doesn't figure out that they can click on the main menu item (although hopefully that will be self describing from the way we draw the hover state as two separate entities).

For this particular entry, in the future we want to move items from the options window into a unified in-content UI (rough mockup of the general idea here: http://www.stephenhorlander.com/images/blog-posts/incontent-ui/win7-preferences-base.jpg) so in that case we would have one item in that block, instead of both Customize and Options

>That is confusing then since selecting customize on the menu bar and in the
>context menu on toolbars both bring up the customize panel.

yeah, we might need to change that to "customize interface"

Comment 6

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

I don't think making "Customize" open the add-ons manager is a good choice. We're seeing lots of people saying they can't find the add-ons manager in the Firefox button so I don't think they are thinking to look under customize in which case I'm not sure why they'd think to click on it even if there is a small icon there.

Comment 7

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Hm, that's some good feedback. Should we change "Customize" to "Add-Ons", or is that pandering to our existing masses in ways that might cost future discoverability?

Comment 8

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

>Hm, that's some good feedback. Should we change "Customize" to "Add-Ons", or is
>that pandering to our existing masses in ways that might cost future
>discoverability?

Yeah, we are actually already planning on switching the text "customize" to "add-ons" (and moving the UI customizations over to an Options sub-menu).

Some of the confusion came out hoping that we might later be able to remove the options item, and have a single entry called "customize" that opened a page that included links to everything (like this, but not with this specific set of items, imagine icons for addons and themes, etc): http://www.stephenhorlander.com/images/blog-posts/incontent-ui/win7-preferences-base.jpg

Comment 9

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

So do we have a final decision on what change we're making here? One that might perhaps be a simple enough change to make b3?

Comment 10

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

Change the main item from "Customize" to "Add-ons," make it a split menu control where the item launches the add-ons manager.  Move the current contents of the customize item to a sub menu under "Options".

Comment 11

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

If you can land this soon that's ideal, but otherwise we'll fix this over in bug 583386

Comment 12

[u88484]

This was fixed by bug 583386.

Comment 13

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Verified fixed with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b5pre) Gecko/20100823 Minefield/4.0b5pre