That logo screen is April 1st fake, mate. Sorry. Originated at: http://www.withinwindows.com/2011/04/01/windows-8-secrets-welcome-screen/

awful. definitely a step backward in terms of simplicity and usability. look at why OSX is so simple to use, finder has such a clear and uncluttered interface, far from what this screenshot shows!

I can’t believe that. The Windows Explorer would get unusable for me if the ribbon can’t be switched off.

Why I think a ribbon toolbar is bad:

- It wastes space. After all, it’s all about content.
- It is not physically close to the content you want to work with. Moving the mouse is a time waster.
- It is always present in the reading direction (left / right / top / down) and so it costs cognitive resources all the time. Whether you want it or not, you need to scan over the ribbon to find the actual content. And there is a lot of information on a ribbon (ghosted items or not).
- Different ribbons at the same place make it hard to remember the individual item’s locations. So before targeting the mouse you need to reprocess the kind of the ribbon that is active right now, then remember or find the location of the item, then target the mouse. It’s even simpler to remember an item position inside a drop-down list in a menu, because to get there, you have to consciously select its context.

I don’t know why ribbons are in existence at all. Is it that some developers find them cool, merely because it was a challenge to program them? Or because developers don’t want to think about how to present the application’s functionality and just present them all.

A ribbon may fix one usability problem (the initial discover-ability of functionality), but it does that by making every other task much harder.

What mental hospital are you writing from? Far from being superior, the ribbon interface is just-about unusable.

Give me my menus back!