The below is my experiences based on menus+toolbars vs ribbon bar. Some detail will be subjective but I've tried to add enough detail that can explain why people considered it to be a "bad" UX:
Things were more discoverable in menus and the written title in the menu is often more descriptive than an icon glyph (granted some items in the ribbon bar does also have labels). You then also had the glyphs on the toolbars for power users.
It meant that super frequent tasks you'd learn shortcut keys for. moderately frequent tasks you'd learn the toolbar icon. And infrequent tasks you could still find through the menus.
The idea of the ribbon bar was to make things more discoverable but the issue is having everything presented in one workflow where icons are different sized, some with or without labels and some hidden behind popup menus on the ribbon bar, you make it harder for people to systematically search for something specific that they can't recall where the option is.
Another benefit with the toolbar was customizability. That was great for people to morph the UI around their requirements. This isn't possible with the ribbon bar -- it's a one size fits all approach so for some people it will work well but there are so many people that don't fit well.
> granted some items in the ribbon bar does also have labels
Nearly all ribbon buttons have labels. That's part of the point of ribbons (there's no room for labels on traditional toolbars). The only buttons that don't have labels are well-known ones, all of which I think are on the Home tab.
> Another benefit with the toolbar was customizability.
The ribbon (at least in Office) is far more customisable than traditional menubar+toolbars. Every part of the ribbon can be customised, and the Quick Access Toolbar exists so that the common buttons that you use can be accessible even when the ribbon is collapsed.
I don't know why you dis-like the ribbon, because none of your arguments make sense.
"Every part of the ribbon can be customised" Afaik, that is not true. I tried to do that just today with Outlook; I cannot remove the ribbons (ribbon groups??) that I don't ever use, Send/Receive for example. (When you're connected on a high speed connection, what's the point of that? But you can't get rid of it.) Likewise, in Word I'm pretty sure you can't remove things like the Mailings ribbon. (Mail Merge? How 1980s...)
Also, if I'm not mistaken you can't add commands to any of the existing ribbons; you have to create a new one, even if you only want to add one command.
It's been a long time since I've used a version of Office with menus (sigh...), but IIRC you could change every part of it.
So on the contrary, if my memory serves, the menu was far more customizable than the Office ribbon. (I don't know about toolbars, I never used them.)
...and the stuff that does have labels isn't ordered as systematically as a list. This might not matter to you but for some people, eg those with a particular type of dyslexia, having a UI that feels a little "jumbled up" genuinely does make it significantly harder to quickly glance through a list of items than reading through a menu where everything is stacked.
(before you object to me calling the ribbon bar "jumbled up", I do understand the logic of how frequent tasks are bigger icons etc. I agree there is a hell of a lot of thought and research gone into the ordering and positioning on the ribbon bar. But for quick glancing when searching for irregular tasks it can superficially appear less ordered than a menu does and that made it much harder for me to find things)
> The only buttons that don't have labels are well-known ones, all of which I think are on the Home tab.
...and what if you don't happen to know those items well? As I said before, the "one size fits all" approach of the ribbon bar hurts those in the edge cases.
> The ribbon (at least in Office) is far more customisable than traditional menubar+toolbars
That's not even remotely true. Every aspect of the toolbar and menus was customizable. The same isn't true for the ribbon bar.
> Every part of the ribbon can be customised
Either this is a later development or you're overstating things significantly because I assure you I could not customize much of Word's (nor Excel IIRC) ribbon bar when it was introduced (2007). Believe me, I had tried. At the time I used to write pluggins for Word, Outlook (which didn't yet have the ribbon, that came with a later release of MS Office) and Excel so I definitely wasn't not some 'n00b' who couldn't work his way around the advanced features of an office suite.
Sure you could create new tabs and customize those but you were severely limited in just how much you could alter existing tabs.
> I don't know why you dis-like the ribbon, because none of your arguments make sense.
That's needlessly antagonistic and completely unhelpful.
