http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=620417
http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=620417#c6
--- Comment #6 from Federico Mena Quintero 2010-07-14 17:05:24 UTC ---
The story behind menu icons goes more or less like this:
1. Many years ago, neither Windows nor MacOS had them.
2. An old version of Excel or Word introduces toolbars with buttons with icons.
Menu items *which correspond to toolbar items* also get icons, but not others.
This is so that you can visually associate menu items to the faster-to-access
items in the toolbar.
3. Excel or Word get customizable toolbars. More commands thus get icons so
that they can appear in the toolbar. Menus start getting more cluttered.
4. GTK+ and GNOME appear, and they get icons in menu items. Few icons are
actually used since we have so few of them.
5. Artists work continually and produce more and more icons. Hackers
eventually end up adding icons to almost everything.
6. Artists see gaps in menus where a few items don't have icons yet, so they
work even harder to fill these gaps.
7. Artists realize that this is madness and decide go back to iconless menus.
I found out about (2) and (3) in the MS Office UI blog. There is a very
interesting discussion of how many commands is too many, and things like that.
My personal opinion:
The week that icons in menus were removed, I was appalled. I thought my menus
lacked something.
Three weeks afterward, I didn't even remember that the icons had once been
there. I don't miss them.
I guess it's the kind of thing which you get used to. I don't know if there is
hard data with evidence about icons in menus making things easier/harder to
use.
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