Everyone Stay Calm, Firefox is Not Adopting the Microsoft Ribbon

Jason Barry — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:47:37 -0500

Alex Faaborg set the record straight on his user experience blog for Mozilla about Firefox 4.0 coming standard with a ribbon interface. There were a slew blogs, tweets, and news articles saying that the latest Firefox would sport the Redmond style-feature. However, it seems the information may have been a bit misconstrued.

Faaborg clarified in his blog, that while they have been investigating the interface trends in popular software products, they have not chosen the “Ribbon” to be an ideal solution for a web browser. He goes on to point out that “a tab based and contextual UI designed for holding a massive number of commands for document creation (a Ribbon) doesn’t actually make any sense for a Web browser” and they have no intention of implementing one.

It would appear the proposed interface for Firefox 4.0 (see image) resembles the Chrome and latest IE front-ends: losing the menu bar, and integrating a minimal command UI.

What do you think? Would Firefox have been better with a pretty little “Ribbon?”

Image Credit: Mozilla

Windows 7 M3 Build 6780 Updates

Justin Kerr — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:29:24 -0500

Screenshots have been appearing all over the net of Windows 7 M3 Build 6780, and one criticism seems to float to the top every time. Users are disappointed that the UI looks exactly like Vista. This reaction although true, should be taken with a grain of salt. Microsoft has a very storied history of leaving user interface tweaks to the very end for a good reason. Popular GUI elements are always in a state of flux among fickle users. Core improvements to the kernel on the other hand, are something that can be worked on at any time while leaving the final layer of Chrome to the very end. A full layout of screen shots of M3 (milestone 3) were posted at thinknext.net and is likely going to be similar to the version Microsoft will show at its upcoming PDC in October. One trend that we can identify now however is the inclusion of the ribbon interface from Office 2007 into core applications like Paint and WordPad. Other than this, things don’t look a whole lot different. Love it or hate it, the ribbon UI seems to be the future of Microsoft applications and is likely to become a trademark of the OS. The latest builds of Windows 7 include Internet Explorer 8 and presumably, given the lengthy turnaround on IE releases, will be the final version included in Windows 7. Currently the OS seems to remain on track for its scheduled launch somewhere between mid 2009 and early 2010. This timetable seems reasonable given that ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley expressed belief that Windows 7 will enter beta 1 by December of this year. Want to see the evolution of the paint UI from Windows 98 to Windows 7 so far? Hit the thumbnails to see f or yourself just how different the Windows 7 version actually is.

Windows 98

Windows XP

Windows Vista

Windows 7

Want to read more about Windows 7 Milestone 3? Check out Mark Soper's breakdown of the new features.

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Everyone Stay Calm, Firefox is Not Adopting the Microsoft Ribbon

Windows 7 M3 Build 6780 Updates