Re: The ribbon
[Author here]
> I fail to see how the ribbon interface is worse
A respectful nod for your careful phrasing here.
I could talk, at considerable length, about keyboard navigability, searchability by reading for those of us who are highly text-centric, avoidance of precision targeted clicking on graphical objects for those of us with moderately poor motor skills, about accessibility for users with real impairments such as no or very low vision, or perfectly good vision but poor motor control (for instance, thanks to Parkinson's) leading to inability to precisely click, and many more carefully reasoned objections.
If you don't have motor control or vision problems yet, don't worry, the odds are that you will.
But that is criticising the specific design.
Let's take a different view: the implementation.
Then I could move on to inflexibility. I turn off all Office app toolbars because I like text, and I use menus only, via keystrokes if possible. (It's not possible on macOS, for instance.) But I also want to see the maximum amount of my work. This article was written in MS Word, in Outline mode. I want to see as much text as possible. That means more lines: bigger letters are counterproductive. That means I want screen _height_ on a widescreen display. So, docks and panels and taskbars are on left and right, not at the top or bottom. Horizontal space is cheap. Vertical space is precious.
But I can't move the Ribbon. It can't work vertically. There is no option.
I want to see as many lines of my document as possible and nothing else taking vertical screen space. I will surrender a line to a title bar or status bar if I must, but not a big fat strip. That's bad. That's a horrible egregious waste of space.
But with this implementation, there is no option. I can hide it but that makes it even worse: I can only search it by interacting with it. I can read and memorise a menu tree of a hundred commands in a few days of use and cope with some options moving.
I can't readily memorise a little tabbed icon grid. I have a fairly poor visual memory but an excellent textual one. Once upon a time I could close my eyes and tell you every entry _and subentry_ on every menu and every dialog box in MS Word and MS Excel. I didn't try to memorise them: I just used them a lot and it stuck. I knew exactly which dialog I wanted, which tab, and the alt-keys to get there.
This doesn't work ribbons. As GJC points out, hotkeys still work, but not all of them, and I can't browse through menus looking for the option that might have moved in one recent release. The specific hotkey for bigger or smaller text works, but not alt-o for fOrmat, F for font, alt-Y for stYle. What's left is not useful for me. Taking 90% of the keyboard UI away and leaving a token tenth without the framework around it is no use. Do I mentally categorise menu commands vs hotkeys? No!
Once again, this UI discriminates unfairly against people with skills like mine. I'm not disabled but it's a bad fit for my personal strengths. It may fit others well but remember that one size does not fit all.
But let's move to a more general case still.
_This is vendor lock in._
The commands for the MS Office don't work in the LibreOffice ribbon-a-like. They don't work in Notepad or Notepad++. They don't work in macOS Text Edit. They don't work in Kate or Gedit or Leafpad or Geany.
Menu trees work everywhere. The subset that's applicable was standardised A THIRD OF A CENTURY AGO by IBM CUA and everyone still sticks to it more or less, but the Ribbon is ™© to Microsoft™ and it doesn't work anywhere else. It would cost any other vendor that wanted to adopt it.
That is the worst part, and you did not even address it.
You're so busy discussing the fit and finish of the shackles, the lovely curved edges that don't chafe, the lightweight alloy chain, the galvanised wristbands that don't corrode, that you didn't notice that they are cuffs and restraints and you're imprisoned by a new and proprietary UI.
Not only is it worse in ergonomic and accessibility and efficiency terms, but it itself is vendor lockin.
Just as Zipped XML files look small and look efficient, but you can't recover corrupted data, you can't pass the files through `strings` and get your data back.
The appearance is of comfort and convenience but in fact it's more insidious vendor lock in.
And I will gladly accept something a bit clunky and a bit old-fashioned rather than a padded silk-lined prison cell, be it Microsoft™ or Apple™.