Firefox getting the dreaded Ribbon?

Lincoln Russell 23 Sep, 2009 at 7:35pm ET Article published 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.

Comments

23 Sep 2009 ~ 9:14pm Thrax Not only that, PC Pro is rehashing some seriously old news in Internet years: Firefox 4.0 theme mockups

Good job, PC Pro!
23 Sep 2009 ~ 9:59pm chrisWhite Am I the only guy around who loves the Ribbon?
23 Sep 2009 ~ 10:00pm Linc Yes.
23 Sep 2009 ~ 10:04pm ardichoke

Lincoln wrote:

Yes.
23 Sep 2009 ~ 10:22pm airbornflght 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.
23 Sep 2009 ~ 11:16pm Thrax

Lincoln wrote:

Yes.
23 Sep 2009 ~ 11:18pm TiberiusLazarus Bets on how long until firefox gets either a plugin or forked to remove that if it gets implemented?
23 Sep 2009 ~ 11:36pm Linc 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.
23 Sep 2009 ~ 11:55pm TiberiusLazarus Oh...skimming articles while playing tf2 for the loss.

/me hides in the corner for a bit.
24 Sep 2009 ~ 2:40am ardichoke Slashdot? Spreading an unfounded rumor? LIES AND SLANDER!
24 Sep 2009 ~ 6:52am Zuntar When forced to use "the ribbon", it ain't that bad. Just takes getting used to like everything else in newer software.
24 Sep 2009 ~ 9:25am CB

Zuntar wrote:

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

fixt
24 Sep 2009 ~ 9:36am Zuntar true^
24 Sep 2009 ~ 10:15am jared 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).
24 Sep 2009 ~ 10:17am Annes 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.
24 Sep 2009 ~ 4:26pm BobbyDigi 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
27 Sep 2009 ~ 5:09pm chrisWhite I really like the Office 2010 improvements, but I'm not a Outlook User. Having them more standardizedâ€”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.