[BobbyTables2]

It’s also stupid in terms of screen real estate.

Earlier Word/CorelDraw/etc had a thin toolbar with lots of functionality. Barely occupied any space at just 800x600 resolution.

Nowadays, the ribbon and all other junk occupy a huge portion of the screen, even at 1920x1080.

It’s amazing how little screen area today actually shows the useful part of a document.

Instead of the Ribbon, a thin context sensitive toolbar would have been more useful.

[omnibrain]

> It’s also stupid in terms of screen real estate.

You can't really blame MS that around the same time screen manufacturers started to switch to 16:9 for cost reasons and cheap laptops all only offered a 1366x786 resolution.

[moron4hire]

The whole "UIs got smaller because the aspect ratio got more rectangular" thing never really made sense to me because 786 > 600. The screens got bigger in both dimensions, regardless of them getting bigger in one more than they got bigger in the other.

[etbebl]

You know the ribbon can be collapsed so that it behaves more like a drop-down menu, right?

[dingaling]

It doesn't really act that way, as (1) it can't be accessed with keyboard shortcuts and (2) it's difficult to scan for the desired feature as it's a visual jumble of buttons and text. Oh, and it might not be visible! Sometimes features can only be found in pop-out dialogs.

Having used Office products for 30+, my most-used feature of the Ribbon is Search, because I don't have time to waste hunting through a poorly-organised heap.

[M95D]

But then, you have to learn the sortcuts (if there are any) or click first to open it, then click button/funciton, which is 50% slower.

Also, classic button bars were customizable. You could add/remove/group buttons in any order you like. And there were lots and lots of buttons that were not present in any of the default toolbars. The ribbon is fixed AFAIK.