Microsoft has announced its UI Fabric has been rebranded and is now known as Fluent UI. The decision reflects the growing influence of Fluent Design across Microsoft’s ecosystem. Fluent UI also combined two of the company’s web engineering frameworks under one roof.
If you are unfamiliar with UI Fabric, it is a collection of UX frameworks from Microsoft. Developers access the tool to build cross-platform experiences that are unified in terms of UI.
Microsoft says Fluent UI combines the Fabric and Stardust frameworks together and make them available through GitHub. According to the company, linking the frameworks allows Microsoft to work in unison on a shared code base.
“This is what we mean when we say Fluent is Microsoft’s design-to-code system. We’re bringing design and engineering together more than ever, to contribute to and leverage a shared foundation, and reach our shared goals. We’re not suggesting that one size fits all, and we got here honestly, so we must evolve collectively.”
Upcoming Features
In a blog post, the Redmond company says Fluent UI will receive a major update this summer. The upcoming features for the tool are as follows:
- “Improve runtime performance through styling optimizations.?We’re evaluating how we can reduce css-in-js style calculation overhead to improve rendering performance.
- Improve flexibility and composition of components. Leverage React hooks and function components, along side API surface improvements, to give developers more composition options.
- Provide a more flexible, powerful theming system. Extend our list of design tokens and improve our theming tooling to apply your design.
- Eliminate deprecated React API usage.?This enables partners to test React concurrent mode rendering, which allows rendering to be interruptible reducing how much the UI thread is blocked during large updates.”
