This blog post is a hands-on experiment. If you have Firefox 3, before you read any further, please go to this page and try out the demo.

(Unfortunately, the demo will only work in Firefox 3.0 and later, because it uses some cutting-edge features of the Canvas object that aren’t supported in Internet Explorer, Safari, or older versions of Firefox. I believe strongly in presenting web content in a cross-browser compatible way, but sometimes for feature demos, requiring Firefox is unavoidable. This is Mozilla labs, after all.)

Anyway, the demo presented two different styles of pop-up menus and asked you to repeatedly select the same menu item.

Which menu style made the task easier? Why do you think that was?

(more…)