Over the years, many users have criticized LibreOffice's interface as "old" and not as "modern" as Microsoft Office's Ribbon, and even regard the latter as the industry standard for office software interfaces. Now, The Document Foundation, the company behind LibreOffice, has publicly hit back, calling this view "completely wrong" and emphasizing that LibreOffice's interface is superior to Microsoft Office in terms of ergonomics and customizability.
The article points out that Microsoft has introduced the Ribbon ribbon since the 2007 version of Office and redesigned it in 2021, relying on the tabbed large icon toolbar to group various commands by function. This design later also affected applications such as Sibelius and MATLAB. LibreOffice also provides a "tabbed" interface option similar to Ribbon, but the foundation insists that Ribbon should not be regarded as a "standard" and even calls it "not a model of good ergonomic design."
LibreOffice said that the advantage of its own interface is that it is "more comprehensive" and highly customizable, while Microsoft Office and its imitators (such as WPS, OnlyOffice) "took shortcuts" and simply copied Microsoft's UI solution. The software provides a variety of interface modes, including Ribbon-like tabbed layout, traditional toolbar interface, compact tabbed style, compact group bar, single context toolbar and sidebar-dominated layout. Users can switch freely according to their habits.
In terms of usability, LibreOffice bluntly stated that there is no evidence that Ribbon is "better" in usability, especially for skilled users, it may reduce efficiency. The foundation criticized many users for equating "Ribbon style" with "modern" or "standard." This evaluation is neither based on objective usability indicators nor supported by design principles, but is the result of Microsoft's market dominance and huge promotion investment to shape Ribbon into a new interface paradigm for productivity software in 2007.
LibreOffice believes that the reason why Microsoft's interface is regarded as "modern" is more due to the "normalization effect caused by popularity": because of its ubiquity, users are accustomed to calling things similar to it modern, and see designs that deviate from it as "problematic", rather than recognizing that it is another intentional design choice. In other words, in their view, "looking like Microsoft Office" reflects more on user familiarity than real ease-of-use advantages.
LibreOffice also took advantage of the trend to emphasize other aspects that it believes are superior to Microsoft Office, including supporting multiple scripting languages such as Basic, Python and JavaScript to write macros, no built-in advertising, no user portraits, completely open source and verifiable code, and native support for the Open Document Format (ODF). The Document Foundation has previously criticized Microsoft's OOXML format for leading to "vendor lock-in" and accused Microsoft of placing commercial interests over open standards and the long-term interests of users.