Microsoft announced today that it is renaming UI Fabric to Fluent UI to simplify and consolidate its design language branding.
“We’re simplifying our story to collectively rally around a single UI library for our web components, Fluent UI,” the Microsoft 365 Team writes in a new post to the Microsoft 365 Developer Blog. “We’ve evolved Microsoft to speak a common language through a shared design system. Fluent UI will directly connect that effort to a broad set of products, through code, specifically the convergence of our most used web engineering frameworks, Fabric and Stardust.”
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Confused? You’re not alone. So let me try to muddle through this.
Microsoft describes Fluent, broadly, as its “design-to-code system.” It’s a “coherent, efficient, and effective” foundation that’s shared by design and engineering, and to date, it’s been most closely associated with the Fluent Design System, which is the design part of that foundation, a common user experience that (hopefully) works across multiple endpoints and form factors.
Fluent UI hits on the engineering end of the Fluent spectrum, as I understand it. It is replacing two previous frameworks, Fabric and Stardust, the former of which I believe was originally called Office Fabric.
“This [change] allows our teams to collectively work together on a shared code base with a shared set of build and development tools to support our products and community more efficiently,” the post continues. “It also allows us to get to a single UI library for Microsoft 365.”
The first major release of the newly-renamed Fluent UI is expected in summer 2020, Microsoft says. After that, it will focus on performance and theming.