UI design

[Candy]

In the context of UI design, I'm wondering about one thing that's fairly major to me. I'm going to have a menu bar (yes, the old-style menu bar) and a tab bar. Which should be on top?

Firefox-style: Menu bar on top, tabs below
Chrome-style: Tabs on top, menu bar below

Most importantly, why?

[fronty]

I'm used to having menu bar on top, because from day 1 I've used windowing, menu bar was the topmost thing in window. Firefox's order just doesn't feel natural to me.

[salil_bhagurkar]

Why don't you merge the two? Consider the ribbon UI of MS Office for example. They have the menu in form of tiny tabs. You could have your main tabs along with the menu tabs

[TylerH]

Firefox 4.0 beta has no menu bar. Take a look, you may like their idea for a replacement for menu bars.

IMO, FF pre-4b style(menu bar in top) is better.

[thomasloven]

Depends on the menu content.
If the menu contains functions for the tab or change when you switch tab - tabs go on top.
If the menu contains functions for the entire window and doesn't care about the current tab - menu goes on top.
Or you could mix them, perhaps?

Also, what will be used the most?
If you switch tabs ten times for each menu action, it quickly becomes anoying to have to move your mouse past the menu bar every time and vice versa.

[Candy]

Depends on the menu content.
If the menu contains functions for the tab or change when you switch tab - tabs go on top.
If the menu contains functions for the entire window and doesn't care about the current tab - menu goes on top.
Or you could mix them, perhaps?

Sounds like a logical way to reason. The idea is to make each application window by default a loose-tab style - like BeOS windows look. If you drag a tab of one window on another, you can combine them to form a group - arbitrarily. Each task in the group may be the same underlying application, but it may be something different completely. It's likely to be the same application though.

[skyking]

Another thing one should consider is if there's a lot of tabs and they must contain text then the side may be a better choice since the tab doesn't consume so much vertical space (this is what I use in galleon).

Also note that the layout of the window may be locale dependent (if you read right-to-left or top-down may alter the way you preceive the ordering of object in a window).

[Combuster]

basically thomasloven's suggestion is a direct application of the gestalt principles - the farther something is away, the less it has to do something with it. But since psychology is such an inexact practice, the only real way to find out is by doing usability tests. And don't forget to consider grandma (if any) - do you need both tabs and menu's or is any combination of that too much?

Also, for a dutch read. http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/hci/ind ... d1=0&id2=0