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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

Removing icons from the menus has been one of the most puzzling decisions they made. In the year or so since its removal, using their menus has been a real struggle, and I can see there's even an entry on Mozilla Connect Ideas for it: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-menu-icons/i...

As for the 'curvy' tabs, I can't say I was a fan of it, even in Chrome, it feels like a waste of space and draws attention to it. The straight tabs, even the 'button' tab is a lot better in being out of the way.

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Icons in menus are good visual anchors which leads to better usability, but only if they are used sparingly. An icon for every menu item ends up being worse.

I think they were using icons properly. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/18i...

The key here is that the icons next to the entries robustly tied the menu entry to the icon in the toolbar: "this menu item does what the button with this icon does".

Getting rid of the icons in this case means you don't get a hint that this menu entry is an alias for that button (or vice versa).

> using their menus has been a real struggle

Could you give an example of it being a struggle?

Let's say you want to print something, all you need to do is pop open the menu and can quickly scan for the printer icon which is a recognizable shape.

Without the icon, you have to consciously read the lines in the menu to make sure you are clicking on the right one.

You still read the text with the printer icon, but it's a faster index-match when the icon is present.

I understand that costs some milliseconds and distraction and might be inferior GUI in many situations, but calling it a "struggle" seems like a large exaggeration, especially for the HN crowd which probably just presses CTRL+P.

I feel the same when people use "shaken" and "jarring" :) . Always seems like a hyperbolic expression for a GUI

Notice: cjk languages often need 3+ key stroke to type a single character.(and sometimes need two more to select the right character). Or you need to remember random letter unrelated to its display name in order to pop it up with one key stroke. It's NOT really a proper alternative. I really hate about the Western centered design firefox introduced in the latest several iterations. It really makes using firefox so painful that I decide to change it on my own using userChrome.css.

Now add to it people that use machines with different language settings. On my own devices English, but clients provide clients in German, Italian or Dutch. With icons and limited language skills it did not matter. But finding the item without exactly knowing what term is used is really frustrating.

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