FAQ

bMenu is the world’s first standard website menu. You can use it both on your computer and mobile while surfing the web.

bMenu gives you a standardised menu and search system that works independent of a websites own design. With bMenu you can navigate or search your way to all pages on the website in an easier and more lucid way than today. bMenu can be compared to making an automatic index in a book, but in this case, the book is the website. You navigate both faster and easier, witch saves you time and money. So, what are you waiting for? Change the way you surf today!

bMenu on your computer

bMenu works as a toolbar in your browser. When bMenu crawls a website, it extracts all the links relevant to the navigation of the website, and the text associated with them. These links are then organized into menus and submenus which are composed and structured together following the website original navigation layout. This gives you the same menu independent of the website you are visiting which helps you navigate easier and faster.

When you execute a search, what you are searching on are both the website link texts, which correspond to the labels of the items in the navigation menus, and the labels of the menus and submenus containing them. What you are not searching on are the whole website contents, since this type of search is provided by other tools (site search, Google, etc.). This gives you more intelligent and correct search results than most sites search options gives you.

In other words, if you think of a website as a book, what bMenu offers is a comprehensive and fast search over the index of the book, which gives an immediate idea of where the contents of interest are located in the book, and how they relate to other contents.

bMenu on your mobile

Navigating online with a cell phone can take a lot of time and patience. When you want to visit a site, you have to navigate through several sites to find what you’re looking for. Lets say you want to check out news about the election in the United States on www.nrk.no. First you have to go to the website, then press “Utenriks” and then “Valg I USA”. You have already visited 3 sites before coming to the site that interests you. When using bMenu you only get the menu, and go directly to the site “Valg I USA” without having to go through several pages linked from the index site. This saves you money and time because you download less Kilo bytes to access the site.

bMenu is strictly related to website navigation, so it seemed natural to have bMenu integrated as close as possible to where website navigation occurs (the browser), hence the toolbar choice.

Having said that, we are very well aware that there’s a lot of toolbars around, and each of them when installed reduces the space for the most important component in the browser, the main window where the web pages are displayed. Despite this, it is a fact that several toolbars provide invaluable extra features to the browser, and we firmly believe bMenu is one of them. Not only for the huge improvement bMenu offers to Internet navigation, but also thanks to that particular aspect that distinguish bMenu from the standard toolbar concept: its dynamicity. bMenu is in fact not a static entity bounded to a specific application or website with a constant set of features, but it is a very dynamic system that changes most of its components depending on the website you are navigating to, making bMenu a sort of one for all websites toolbar (which can be actually seen as a space-saver rather than a space-waster).

After installation the bMenu menu should appear above the bMenu site

Please note that the bMenu menu will look different depending on what site you visit.

General

1. Toolbar options

   1. Click the toolbar options button for bMenu home, Register a site, Invite a friend, Feedback, FAQ, Tools and About bMenu page. Under tools you can change which search engine to use for the site search (see 4.), clear the cache, low bandwidth option, check for a new version of the toolbar and submit a bug. For advanced settings click here.

2. Go to site home

   1. Click the site home button to go straight to the front page of the site you are currently viewing.

3. Search box

   1. In the search box you can enter any word(s) you would like to search for in the site menu, or a selected search engine. The search results will appear in a drop down menu after you have typed 2 or more letters, and will be filtered based on your further input.

4. Change size of search field

   1. Self-explanatory

5. Search engine options

   1. Choose which search engine to use for non-menu searches.

6. Recent pages

   1. Click the recent pages button to see the last sites you have visited on the domain you are currently on.

7. Site information

   1. Click the info button to find site info such as contact us, people, about us and careers. For example on The New York Times page you will find the relevant info for The New York Times.

8. RSS-feeds on the site

   1. All RSS-feeds on the visited domain will appear when you click the RSS button. This is an easy way to check for updated content such as news.

9. Site menu

   1. Click the site menu to enjoy the overview of the site menu and content. Navigate the site menu using the mouse and/or arrow keys.

10. Right menu

    1. Some bMenu toolbars have a right menu that is always present, for example Nettavisen. This way your favorite site is within easy reach. Excellent for being updated on news etc. You can remove the right menu in the toolbar options.

Expert options

With bMenu you don't need to be an expert to find what you're looking for faster

bMenu can be used in two ways:

1. Browsing its menus and submenus to find the item of interest:

and then click on the item to navigate to the web page associate with it:

2. Using the search to find what you are looking for in a much quicker way. For example, to find the same Color Line item in the picture above, start by typing co into the search field. bMenu will then search for co within all the textual data contained in the menus and submenus, and, if found, will show all the search results within a drop-down list that automatically appears below the search field:

You can then browse the search results within the list, and highlight the one of interest, using the up/down arrow keys:

Once you have selected the search result you are looking for, press Enter to locate it within the menus and submenus, to visually understand its context within the website (Sites ->Travel ->Color Line):

and then either press Enter again to navigate to the page associated with the search result:

or Esc to return to the search field to select a different search result or to execute a new search.
In case no search results are found within the menus and submenus textual data, no drop-down list is shown, but you can press Enter to execute a site search if provided by the website:

Definitely the support for RSS feeds. When you see the RSS icon in a menu:

that indicates a submenu associated with an RSS document, which feed titles retrieved and displayed in the submenu when you mouse over it:

If you then want to read more about a specific RSS feed, simply select the item associated with the feed and click on it:

bMenu also keeps track of the RSS feeds you have read, displaying them differently:

Since RSS feeds change pretty quickly, they are not actually part of the website navigation menus, but they are inserted into the menu, and removed from it, dynamically. For this reason, RSS feeds are not searchable using the search feature described above. What you can search though is the subject of the RSS feeds, so that when you select it from the search results drop-down list and press Enter, the feeds for that subject are automatically read and their title displayed, as shown below for the Fotball norsk VG RSS feeds:

Please do tell us! Open the bMenu menu, select Tools, and click Submit a bug. You will be redirected to a page where you can fill the bug details, and submit it.

We aim to process (but not solve) all bug reports within the day of submission.

Thanks! We are always looking for bright people to join our team.

If you are interested in shaping the future of Internet navigation, please do contact us.

Yes, bMenu is free for all Internet users, both from your computer and cell phone.

For any other questions you might have, don't hesitate to send us an email: support@bmenu.com.