Howdy, stranger! Ready to join the community? [log in]

Firefox getting the dreaded Ribbon?

Matt Lincoln Russell September 23, 2009 7:35 PM ET in Tech

There have been reports that “Office 2007’s Ribbon” is coming to Firefox. We’re not exactly sure how one gets that from Mozilla’s recent development notes on Firefox’s UI, however.

PC Pro quotes this passage from the dev notes:

Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon(now in Paint and Wordpad too).

From this, they come to the conclusion (which Slashdot parrots) that Firefox is getting the Office Ribbon. But it doesn’t say that. The attached concept screen shots don’t even look anything like Office’s Ribbon; they look a lot like Safari and Chrome’s latest iterations.

But then again, good design choices don’t get Slashdotted.

Share |

17 Comments:

  1. Thrax
    Cad
    23 Sep '09, 9:14 pm

    Not only that, PC Pro is rehashing some seriously old news in Internet years: Firefox 4.0 theme mockups

    Good job, PC Pro!

  2. chrisWhite
    Polygons
    23 Sep '09, 9:59 pm

    Am I the only guy around who loves the Ribbon?

  3. Matt Lincoln Russell
    Snapperhead
    23 Sep '09, 10:00 pm

    Yes.

  4. ardichoke
    King Banana Spanner
    23 Sep '09, 10:04 pm
    Quoting Lincoln

    Yes.
  5. airbornflght
    McLovin
    23 Sep '09, 10:22 pm

    Maybe office 2010 is different but I find the ribbon intuitive. Sure it's different and requires getting used to, but I'm over it.

  6. Thrax
    Cad
    23 Sep '09, 11:16 pm
    Quoting Lincoln

    Yes.
  7. TiberiusLazarus
    I Miss Keebler
    23 Sep '09, 11:18 pm

    Bets on how long until firefox gets either a plugin or forked to remove that if it gets implemented?

  8. Matt Lincoln Russell
    Snapperhead
    23 Sep '09, 11:36 pm

    It isn't getting implemented, that's the point. PC Pro made the damn thing up from an (intentional?) misreading of the dev paper and now it's being reported on Slashdot like it's fact.

  9. TiberiusLazarus
    I Miss Keebler
    23 Sep '09, 11:55 pm

    Oh...skimming articles while playing tf2 for the loss.

    /me hides in the corner for a bit.

  10. ardichoke
    King Banana Spanner
    24 Sep '09, 2:40 am

    Slashdot? Spreading an unfounded rumor? LIES AND SLANDER!

  11. Zuntar
    Modder extraordinaire
    24 Sep '09, 6:52 am

    When forced to use "the ribbon", it ain't that bad. Just takes getting used to like everything else in newer software.

  12. CB
    Doktor Schnabel von Rom
    24 Sep '09, 9:25 am
    Quoting Zuntar

    When forced to use "the ribbon", it ain't that bad. Just takes getting used to like everything else in life.

    fixt

  13. Zuntar
    Modder extraordinaire
    24 Sep '09, 9:36 am

    true^

  14. jared
    Howdy Damnit
    24 Sep '09, 10:15 am

    Office 2010 is worse than Office 07 - even though it doesn't seem possible.

    Outlook users for 2010 are absolutely fucked as they are taking 10 steps backwards by downgrading the rendering engine (using Word lololol).

  15. Annes
    Leching since ought-five
    24 Sep '09, 10:17 am

    I like Office 2007 quite a bit. When you customize it it's way more efficient. The auto-formatting also sucks a lot less than it has in previous versions of Office.

  16. Bobby1211
    iMap
    24 Sep '09, 4:26 pm

    Rumor put to rest. No Ribbon for Firefox. From Linked Slashdot Article:

    Update: 09/24 05:01 GMT by T : It's not quite so simple, says Alexander Limi, who works on the Firefox user experience. "We are not putting the Ribbon UI on Firefox. The article PCpro quotes talks about Windows applications in general, not Firefox." So while the currently proposed direction for Firefox 3.7 involves some substantial visual updates for Windows users (including a menu bar hidden by default, and integration of Aero-styled visual elements), it's not actually a ribbon interface. Limi notes, too, that Linux and Mac versions are unaffected by the change.

    -Bobby

  17. chrisWhite
    Polygons
    27 Sep '09, 5:09 pm

    I really like the Office 2010 improvements, but I'm not a Outlook User. Having them more standardized—even in Viseo-rocks.

    Firefox would be just plain stupid for using the Ribbon though. The ribbon is only really good at managing a massive number of different options and buttons no need in Firefox. But someone will think it's a good idea and hack it.

    I for one love the 4.0 design mock up Mozilla did, I've been running a set of addons and a theme for a while now that gets close to 4.0.

Hey, be nice. Icrontic is full of good people, we promise.

New Features on Icrontic: