I'm only here because PETA asked me come and unbeat this dead horse.
Beating a dead horse on the Font issue; The "Menu Bar" is, um, dead. No new products this decade are being shipped with menu bars, and certainly not File or View. That may be part of the confusion.
That's a very blunt statement. It's also very easy to disprove. For one, I just cycled through all my windows, most of which are applications released in 2012 or later (Steam, Origin, Skype, Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, Photoshop, Ableton); only Chrome's and Firefox's are hidden by default. Note that I say hidden, not gone, because the conceptual UI element still exists as a contextual menu in Chrome, and in Firefox it literally is just hidden (actually this is a lie-- I've configured Firefox to display it by default since I use it quite a bit, but I'll give this one to you). Also note that, contrary to your statement, Firefox has "File" and "View", and wuddya know, View is where you can set a font (through CSS overrides, albeit). Do you still think Firefox's UI is the way to go? Also, mIRC has (and does) already have this support, but it's just not on by default. Even Win8 didn't get rid of the menubar, it's just not visible by default. So, the menubar has not disappeared, it's just been shoved into a drawer because it's not immediately necessary anymore.
But let's step back, because it's important to understand the context in which UIs are used. The menubar was not shoved into a drawer because it's being killed off. It's being shoved into a drawer, because, just like your forks and knives, you don't need to keep them sitting out on your table all day. 90% of the time they take up space. That said, you still need them to eat. By the same token, the menubar is still necessary. We can talk about making the menubar hidden by default-- that's a valid suggestion-- not really that necessary, but valid. If you removed it altogether you would need to replace it with something.
Onto replacing... the ribbon is the only possible choice here. But let's step back again and understand what the ribbon is meant to solve, and why it's NOT being applied everywhere. You heard me, even MS explains when to and when not to use a Ribbon. The following is from
MSDN:
Is there a large number of commands? Would using a ribbon require more than seven core tabs? Would users constantly have to change tabs to perform common tasks? If so, using toolbars (which don't require changing tabs) and palette windows (which may require changing tabs, but there can be several open at a time) might be a more efficient choice.
Does the program benefit from making the content area of the program as large as possible? If so, using a menu bar and a single toolbar is more space efficient than a ribbon. However, if your program requires three or more rows of toolbars or uses task panes, using a ribbon is more space efficient.
If you're actually suggesting mIRC move towards ribbons, we should be having a discussion about whether the answer to these questions actually falls in the favour of using them. But the point here is that even MS knows ribbons are not meant for everything. If you read the above text carefully, they even imply that menubars and toolbars are not going to be removed from every part of Windows. They also did a lot of usability research to decide that the places where they DO use it do in fact benefit from ribbons. It's hard to say that mIRC would benefit, without any data at all, but that said, my hypothesis would be that mIRC does not have nearly enough toolbar buttons or menubar items to fill the conceptual nature of the ribbon's "rich commands" and multiple tabs. The ribbon is more than a way to display larger toolbar icons, and frankly, mIRC doesn't have a need to take advantage of its features.
I want to circle back to the crux of this argument though, which is that mIRC is too difficult to setup for new users, because I think it ties into this specific tangent.
MS used a lot of usability data to drive their design decisions about the ribbon usage. Similarly, mIRC should do the same. Your data seems fairly anecdotal, but more importantly, it's also questionable in validity, as it's subject to heavy selection bias. Quite simply, your sample isn't random. The new users that you are helping are there
because they are frustrated by mIRC, so it follows that they have things to complain about. The problem is they do not represent the entire mIRC userbase.
Let's go back to MS's research in ribbons. One of the reasons they settled on the UI was because they discovered an interesting fact about users: most of them aren't trying to do anything crazy with the software they are being provided. In other words, they found that
70% of all clicks were on the default pallette, and I've seen other numbers in MS's redesign of the explorer ribbon that show similar results.
Following that, I would hypothesize as well that many of those users aren't very interested in customizing their look and feel of Windows or Word, if they aren't even interested in using major subsets of the program. If mIRC's userbase is similar to Windows' or Word's userbase (which should follow, since they are Windows users after all), then you
should be seeing similar numbers on the amount of users that actually spend time customizing the look and feel of the program. We as support volunteers may hear about it more in channels like #mirc or #irchelp because they only join when they have problems, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's common in absolute terms.
Final thought: I'm not saying mIRC is perfect, and the font dialog could use a simplification, but if the goal is to make recommendations, let's do it based on data, not conjecture. There's no evidence that the problem with Font options is that they are in the View menu
