And why not compare against actual 2023 Word? The Ribbon collapses down to simplified elements that trigger popups when space constrained. The writing surface dominates.
This is what a more fair comparison looks like. https://i.imgur.com/wAqSvrV.png
And the issue isn't the content margins, it's the UI. There's no reason to have a paste button 3-4x the size of other buttons, for example.
When Microsoft created the ribbon layout, this was the tail-end of when they were still doing lots of user-research, by putting real users in labs and observing how well they did at common tasks.
So I believe them that having a paste button 3-4x bigger than the size of the other buttons is actually better for the majority of the users.
These days UIs are just all defined by the designer or developers personal preference, without any actual user testing ("personally I just use command-V, why would you even NEED a paste button??!!", "lets make all these icons tiny and gray and obscure because it looks cleaner!!")
1) There's plenty of room for editing
2) The UX at the top is about 25% taller because everything (fonts, icons) is scaled to be about 25% larger in each dimension for readability since people have bigger screens now.
And so actually, usable area has actually increased as a proportion of average consumer screen height.
The original Twitter post is just a silly unfair comparison.
That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons.
Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.
It's something I think about a lot with the Ribbon because it has some really good keyboard mnemonics in Office applications, but mostly only Power Users think to press the Alt button to let them "bubble in" on the Ribbon. The keyboard mnemonic bubbles make great landmarks, and I think that remains one of the reasons I rather like the Ribbon (as a power user) that a lot of people never discover. (In part because I was there a million years ago when Word first lost the underlines and was used to even then pressing Alt on its own just to see them so that behavior carried over to the Ribbon just fine for me, luckily enough.)
Ribbons surface more elements to browse in a freeform context, which is correct if you need to discover features...but also conflicts with the goal of a toolbar to be a thin layer over the shortcuts.
This and the hidden ribbons completely ruin the thing for me. But I do tend to like megamenus on other applications, so the problem is probably office, not the ribbons.
There is a really robust search area, at least as implemented in Office. It will show you where the button is on which ribbontab (at least last I used Office, which was years ago).
So we have:
* Is actually no worse than the existing solution.
* Contains a tool to address limitations carried over from the existing solution.
Correctly implemented ribbons are strictly superior to prior interfaces (ignoring any styling approaches, such as flat UI). The only issue with them is that cheese has been moved, and people are upset about that.
I never used Word until recently, or any wysiwyg Word processor really.
The ribbon is just confusing. It so happens many of the functions I use are not surfaced, so I have to remember which tiny expando angle to click and that a function I use often is demoted in a ribbon to a smaller icon.
It is pain. Some functions are more visible and surfaced at the expense of added friction in the others. Which functions are surfaced is guess work and statistics. Outliers suffer.
The old menu styles made each function roughly equal in their level.
I could customise the ribbon, but then when I Google how to do something, my menus don't match the examples!
Madness
The ribbon is nothing more than a menu laid out in a grid, rather than a list.
The tool I'm referring to is the search box. It should be on the window chrome, alongside the ribbon tabs. You can find verification of that claim in your copy of Word, or basically any screenshot of it. The source is that it exists.
Hum... Yes. That's probably a major reason why it's harder to search.
The ribbon, on the other hand, reads like someone took all the icons off the toolbars, shook them up in a toybox full of other junk and clutter, and dumped it all out into a messy pile. Randomly sized icons, arrow menus, tabs, just scattered haphazardly all over.
There's no way that can be considered 'strictly superior' to a clean, straightforward, well-organized UI.
Why is insert cross reference smaller than inserting a bookmark or hyperlink?
Who knows!
I think the best fix for this problem is to have different sets of toolbars for different tasks, a sort of modality. Ribbons achieve this, but but they also bring odd bits of seemingly arbitrary UI design that can't be changed, like the gigantic paste button in Word's Home ribbon which can't be removed without removing the whole control group. The more uniform/standardized nature of the old toolbars is preferable in my eyes.
There were probably some AOL types who accidentally opened toolbars and couldn't figure out how to close them. But no one who knew how to use Word launched two dozen toolbars as in that infamous image. Keep in mind toolbars (plural) arose from a single bar of tools that was limited with the width of the screen. Someone who knows more than me may want to comment, but my guess was that product groups didn't like seeing their features buried in three layers of flyout menus and used by no one. (Tools...Options...) At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started.
The best explanation of the ribbon I can remember comes from Jensen Harris's old blog[1]. Unfortunately much of his goals and designs were dropped to make the original ship date, leaving the ribbon the mess that it was, and not much better today imho.
The biggest loss was for keyboard users, for whom correctly chorded toolbar mnemonics (win32 parlance: accelerator keys) were dropped for nonsensical ribbon chords where the keyboard letter had almost nothing to do with the desired feature. And to add insult to injury, menu operations that used to happen in milliseconds took nearly full seconds to do the same thing on capable machines of the time (and even today).
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ (unfortunately as with all old blogs, sans images. Raymond Chen was right once again)
I'm pretty sure Office had customizable toolbars, so yes, every menu item should be a toolbar item, but it's unlikely that anyone actually wants them all enabled. And yeah, customizing toolbars is pretty far up the learning curve; so I understand the motivation for the Ribbon, but I managed to stop using office before I had to experience it, so I don't know how well it actually worked.
The ribbon is, and continues to be, garbage. Most days I have to resort to the "Search" function in Office to locate a feature for which I clearly remember the exact menu location from 25 years ago, yet I'll be god damned if I could find it in the ribbon after over 10 minutes of searching.
I have a 10" LCD as a secondary monitor, positioned above my main display. I wouldn’t want to replace it with anything else, it’s just as perfect for my needs as it gets.
Technically it’s 2K, but it’s so small that I use it at 2× scale. That means its effective resolution is 960 × 540, just 8% more pixels than 800 × 600.
Apple is the pied pier, leading all the rats off a cliff (unified and locked-down single device, it's coming), and we're the rats who follow blindly. Nobody questions the design decisions, they presume it's good because Apple did it.
It's good, but not for them.
No they aren't. CSS pixels are completely irrelevant to this discussion, not to mention it is fundamentally misunderstanding what they are.
>all because when Apple does something
I have no idea why Apple is catching strays in a conversation discussing non-Apple software, for a problem not seen in Apple software.
I don't think they're strays or unwarranted. Apple makes icons flat, every else makes icons flat. Apple adds white-space around icons, everyone else does.
They are! look at the viewport specifications
https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/experie...
They are actually smaller than 800x600. Most of the web is now optimized for these sizes
And FWIW, little to nothing on the web is optimized for less than 800x600. We work with the fake pixels as just another measurement tool, but actually using most websites with physically less than 800x600 is brutal.
Some are Funny and you see, Massive Hamburger (1/3 of the screen followed by a Cookie Consent taking another 1/3 of the screen.) -- I don't stay on these sites often.