Ridiculous: Windows 8 explorer is to get a ribbon.

[Van Rijn]

I just saw this article at Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/new...explorer.ars/1

where they're apparently saying that the reasonable menus are to be replaced by a ribbon. I *HATE* the Office 2010 ribbon UI because it is so much harder to find things through the ribbon than with a menu. I was actually looking forward to Windows 8, because it has a feature I'm very interested in (a smart way to pool heterogeneous drives into a single pseudo-drive - I already have a server that does that, but it looks like they have a better approach) but unless there's a workaround for the stupid ribbon, I'll probably avoid Windows 8 for as long as possible.

Quoting the article:

Since its introduction in Office 2007, the ribbon has been a polarizing user interface. The ribbon's purpose was to make a package that was feature-packed but unwieldy more approachable—to enable people to find more of those features when they wanted to use them. Microsoft says that it has broadly succeeded at this goal, and there is evidence that all but the heaviest Office users regard it as an improvement.

That's ridiculous. I'm not a heavy user, and my primary complaint with the Ribbon is that it made it MUCH HARDER to find features I only use occasionally. I used to be able to read the text of the menus and quickly follow them down to the function I wanted. Now I'm faced with icons that mean nothing to me, so I'm usually forced to Google search for the sequence of icons I'm supposed to click to get to the function I wanted. I get used to the icons for the stuff I use the most, but for the less common stuff I usually forget by the time I need it again. If I was a heavy user, I would probably have better luck remembering them all.

I hate the entire approach. Give me text, not meaningless icons.