Firefox Adding a Ribbon?

Sep 23, 2009

It is being reporting that Firefox will replace menus with an Office-style ribbon interface. Personally, I couldn't be more against this. I'm no fan of the Office ribbon (it takes up way too much screen real estate and looks clunky), and I fail to see how this interface will make things better for the user. Mozilla is known for screwing around with the GUI, however, so I won't be surprised when something like this shows up. I can't imagine how this change will affect many extensions out there, like Googlebar Lite, that add UI elements.

What do you think about the Office ribbon interface? And what do you think of this decision? Thankfully for me, someone will undoubtedly come out with a theme to fix this stupid design decision. Consider me signed up for it already!

1 Comment

kip

5:07 PM on Sep 24, 2009
When I was forced to use it in Word at my last job, I eventually came to accept that it was a better way of organizing the most common functions than the toolbars of older versions. But as soon as you have to do something that's not on the default ribbons, you spend five minutes searching for that setting that used to be easy enough to access under a Tools menu or whatever, but now it is under some random ribbon that you wouldn't expect. As far as using the ribbons in Firefox, I don't see the point. There aren't that many things you do with a web browser besides enter urls, search, and navigate. What else would they possibly add in the ribbons?

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