The ribbon is actually a good interface, for me at least, much more pleasant to use than toolbars.

The flatness and whitespace everywhere though, that can die in a fire.

Nah mate. Biggest issue I’ve ever had with the Ribbon is that 1. I didn’t have to use it very often and 2. It conflates menus and toolbars together and 3. The only time I’ve ever had to use it was when helping a friend find the action they are looking for.

It’s been around for 11 or 12 years and as recently as 2-3 years ago I was still helping friends out with it. The only reason I was ever able to figure out how to find what they were looking for is that I had what was essentially the trivia knowledge of what the Ribbon was meant to be good at rattling around in my head from reading about it years ago and what was left of my experience with the internal hierarchy of the apps from the late 90s. More often than not, it was some thing I knew used to be a menu item.

Menus and toolbars are a bit easier to figure out without prior knowledge, but where’s the fun in sticking with what is known to work well when you can reinvent the wheel and declare it to be a better wheel because it is newer and therefore must be better. Because it is newer.

Ribbons are far harder to scan than menus; text is easier to scan for new semantic associations (actions you've never performed before), and menus have a regular aligned layout, while ribbons inconsistently mix text and icons and use inconsistent action sizing requiring an irregular scan pattern.

If you're a repeat user, icons start becoming easier to find than text, and the inconsistent grid starts having a geographic element that helps with muscle memory. For a new user, I reckon menus are easier, especially if combined with status bar help text (remember that?).

> requiring an irregular scan pattern

Yes - you've just made me aware of how and why scanning a ribbon always felt somehow more physically exerting to me, the 'manual work' of dragging my eyeballs around and about, instead of in a straight line.

Plus with buttons of different sizes, you have to 'zoom' your attention in and out to catch them all; while the harder I try to find something, the more I naturally tend to lean forward and crane into the small details, and miss the wood for the trees.

But toolbars are essentially the same thing except they don't waste space, are moveable, resizable, typically customizable, and can be hidden.

In Microsoft office, I often found it hard to find the button I was looking for because the buttons weren't group with similar buttons in the toolbar, and were distributed randomly. I prefer the tabbed+grouped layout of the ribbon because it fixes that organization problem. All the basics are in "Home", if I need to adjust the layout I go to layout, etc. Then within those tabs, common actions/properties are grouped together. I never want to go back to the old toolbar layout in Office 2003.

Should be noted that the ribbon can be customized (in most apps I've seen it anyway) and hidden. Many toolbars are not very resizable (for good reasons).

The big difference is fewer clicks to do what you most often do (with ribbons). The cost is using more space and possibly cluttering the UI. You can also argue easier discoverability, but I'd guess that's up for debate (seems to for my old parents, but that's a quite small sample size).

Ribbon gets more useful once you have a device with a touch screen. It's like a toolbar, except the buttons are bigger and it has tabs. I started to appreciate it (particularly in Windows Explorer) when I got my first 2-in-1 device. That said, with a stylus, regular toolbars work OK too.

IME, ribbons are way too fiddly to work well as a pure touch interface. Toolbars with "large" buttons (as first seen, IIRC, in Win98) are a lot better.

> Ribbon is dynamic to your current task, using a table? Table tab is available.

So were toolbars in Microsoft Office were similarly dynamic.

Toolbars were not keyboard accessible, and usually unlabeled. The ribbon is a huge improvement.

Toolbars came with explanations that popped up if you hovered.

They also were primarily shortcuts as everything could be reached using the menus anyway.

They also swosh around.

They also aren't predictable.

There's no reason toolbars couldn't also be dynamic.

Ribbon is just that.

Do you have examples of other apps with dynamic toolbars that work better?

The ribbon has Alt shortcuts with clear hints. It’s an all-around improvement on menus.

Not on the Mac though. But Macs also don’t have alt shortcuts in menus.

Ribbon buttons are smaller than menu items and have no text until you hover over them. They're both harder to find and harder to press even if you know where they are. And somehow there seems to be less space in ribbon than in menus, because some commands are tucked away in second-level palettes. E.g. you need to open the "Reveal formatting" palette in MS Word:

1. Switch to Home pane. 2. Click the tiny icon at the bottom right corner of the styles section. It will open the "Styles" palette. The icon is unlabeled, of course. 3. At the bottom of the "Styles" palette there are three icons. One of them opens "Style Inspector" palette. It's hard to tell which one until you hover it to read the tooltip as they're pretty similar. 4. At the bottom of the "Style Inspector" we have two more icons. Again, hover over them to see which one opens the "Reveal Formatting" palette. 5. There you are. I don't know if there's a shorter route.

A good menu would be much more discoverable.

I don't see how. Do you remember office menus and toolbars? They were insane. I remember the 'collapsed' menus in 2003 as a low point in UI design.

(Shift+F1 opens the 'reveal formatting' pane. I think it's tucked away on purpose, as a 'wrong' way to do things in modern Word)