Why we revamped our navigation menu
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While some browsers cut down on functionality and options, we expand those in order to give you more control and better productivity. Here’s what inspired us to redesign Vivaldi’s menu.
Click here to see the full blog post
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@OlgaA I am a keen keyboard user. Access keys are a universal shortcut to activate menu and dialogue items that don't need to be memorised, though frequently used ones like Alt+F, X for Exit do become habitual.
Not so long ago we could use access key (A) to add the active tab to an open bookmark bar folder. That was broken in an update because some users complained about the item being at the top of the menus, which is actually where it should be.
Move Add Active Tab Back to the Top of the Menus
Now, the access key no longer works if any other menu item uses the (A) access key.
Ideally, we should be able to access the Bookmarks Bar with a shortcut, but Alt+B for the Bookmarks Menu is workable.
Even better, Allow Editing of Menus, the top voted feature request with 280 votes after 22 months. (The request is actually much older than that).
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I agree with Pesala - the Add Bookmark item belongs on top of each sub-menu, not at the bottom which makes no sense intuitively. The people who wanted it gone were mouse-users who complained about how it broke their "flow" using the bookmarks bar, which again makes no sense.
Even for mouse users who rely on the bar, having the entry at the bottom means having to move the cursor an arbitrary amount to add a bookmark, depending on the number of entries. So it would even make effective mouse use much harder.
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@Pesala said in Why we revamped our navigation menu:
Now, the access key no longer works if any other menu item uses the (A) access key.
In this particular case, up arrow would take you straight to the "add active tab" option...
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Over to you now. Do you rely on the menu for your workflow?
Beyond testing that it works... not at all .
MG & KB are is fastest to activate functions I commonly use. TB are good for less common items which need to convey information to me at a glance. And as a last resort QC can find whatever I need without needing to remember which menu it was in.
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My news panel.
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Sounds like you're doing great stuff. Exactly what I need from your description.
Will start looking for new features after lunch and checking them out. -
@pathduck: I was never a fan of "Add Active Tab" and having it at the top of a Bookmarks menu drove me crazy. I was always adding random bookmarks and constantly cursing under my breath; it was also a PITA deleting them after. For me, I prefer using ⌘D for adding bookmarks.
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Not much has changed. I would say nothing. So it would be better to change the title to "What we added to the Menu" instead of what we changed. Big changes in the menu aesthetics could be useful.
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@xyzzy If you prefer the Ctrl+D route, then this does not affect you. Opera for Presto has the Bookmark Page item at the top, then Open All Folder Items. Some of us spent ten years or more using Opera and got used to that way of working.
The benefit of Add Active Tab on the Bookmarks Bar, is that one can quickly add any bookmark to a folder. The Add Bookmark dialogue makes that a lot more difficult. That is why there are open requests for adding folders and a collapsible folder tree on the Add Bookmark dialogue.
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Do you rely on the menu for your workflow?
Menu? That's what?
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@Pesala All you bookmarks bar users… ()
I also (the also referred to @xyzzy) use Ctrl+D and the way folders are listed there is for me the best to quickly find what I need (pff… going through all the bookmark folders menus… )
But I think that if I would use the bookmarks bar (and the add active tab feature), I would expect it to be at the top — at least as a header, because I can't imagine having the bookmarks right from the top.
A nice half-off topic, if anyone's going to continue this discussion, don't expect me to reply.
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@Pesala No, that's not true at all.
If you prefer the Ctrl+D route, then this does not affect you.
The problem is that I DO use the Bookmarks menu for navigating the bookmark tree, and I also (gasp) use browsers other than Vivaldi as well, so when Vivaldi deviates from native platform conventions and makes UI choices that make it stick out in really odd ways, it gets really annoying for me really quickly.
I also understand your reasons for wanting things a certain way as well, so I'm all for having ways to tweak Vivaldi's behaviour in Settings.
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@GraveDigger Agree a 1000 fold the main reason i started using vivaldi was because i can shrink the ui so that i didnt have 1/5 of the screen taken up with headers. i find chrome completely unusable.
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@mattsolo45: That you see
The menu has been rewritten from the ground up to allow more flexibility. So yeah, maybe not much changed from your point of view (a lot changed for me, as the menu was broken in Linux), but a lot has changed -
@axk: "a more spacious modern address bar, with some bigger font, like other browsers have done" -
HELL NO!!! If I want that I would use those other space stealing browsers!
One of the more annoying browser (and other software) gui trends was wasting space for no good reason. -
@AXK Allowing users to Choose Font for GUI is the way to go here. Opera 12.18 has it; one can choose the typeface as well as the font size.
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@potmeklecbohdan Sorry for the alphabet soup Toolbar Buttons, Mouse Gestures, KeyBoard & Quick Commands
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@LonM said in Why we revamped our navigation menu:
Beyond testing that it works... not at all
I just realised that there is one item which I can't access outside of the menu > check for updates. That would be great if implemented.