The Menu + quick access bar was good for developers but terrible for users, at least compared to the ribbon.

Ribbon is absolutely an improvement for users but is more work for the XML layout and learning how to organize it.

I'm rather convinced that Ribbon is still the best way to organize quick actions, show their shortcuts (Alt to see keyboard shortcuts), and also have enough text to describe all the buttons. But it'd be nice if it were easier to make good Ribbons.

Menu was braindead easy, albeit through ancient process of .rc files and whatnot

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thesuitonym 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm just not sure why it has to be one or the other. Look at NeXTStep. They had a menu bar (or I guess a menu panel) and a ribbon, although that term didn't exist yet, and it was definitely not 100% there yet.

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max51 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it's the other way around. Well organised menus can help users discover what functions are available at quick glance without having to hover each icons with the mouse to know what they do. For power users, the ribbons mean you can click directly on the function you need without having to click through menus and sub-menus.

	▲	dragontamer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Menus from Win95 are uniform. All buttons took up one row and a full width of the submenu. (Even if you don't have a shortcut key assigned, the space is taken up and wasted) It's well acknowledged that modern designers and users benefit from large vs small, and other varying styles of organization. Menus only had top menus vs submenu vs sub-sub-menu (and so forth). Yes a good menu is useful but... A ribbon offers many more tradeoffs. It's harder to design a good ribbon, but the best ribbons are always better than even the best menu. The important features will be physically larger with more text and space. The less important or niche features might just be an icon with tooltip, possibly hidden behind a subcategory of the ribbon. In theory, you can use the modern Ribbon to make old school menus. But why bother? If you made the switch to that XML design language, you might as well take all the benefits of the Ribbon Or hell, if you like old school menus, you can still make them today. Those .RC editors still work in modern Windows 11. But give it a shot and you'll see how restrictive and bulky old school menus are in practice.