Contrast is Satan to designers, because being able to distinguish the zones of a UI messes with their perfect colour blocking.

I’m so tired of neck beards assuming that any spacing in a design is a waste, as if a good design packs every milimeter with stuff. Proper application of negative space is common in art and throughout design.

I assume the extra padding was a function of touch screens becoming more prevalent since trying to hit the 2003 style buttons with a finger was not that easy, although I don't remember offhand when touch first started becoming a thing in Windows so it might have happened the other way around. But either way it's likely still a factor in why the ribbon with its extra padding has stuck around.

Weirdly as someone who has used both styles heavily, I'd say the ribbon is more practical than the old toolbars. There's more contextual grouping and more functional given the tabs and search, plus the modern flat design is less distracting, which is what I'd want from a productivity application. Also for me two rows of toolbars & a menu is about the same height as the ribbon anyway, and you can collapse the ribbon if you want to use the space

It seems easier to find things for users. Probably part of dumbing things down.

My mom went through this last week with Libre Office. She said she couldn’t find anything because the ribbons from Word weren’t there. I found the option and enabled it and she said that was much better.

Whereas, I use Word 365 on a daily basis but I still know where things are from the classic menus.

But users want big pictures and less words, less menus.

So UI designers have done that.

You see that in the change between Windows 7 and Windows 8 in heavy ways. More buttons and less menus.

I fucking hate the dumbing down, especially on servers.

Funny story, before they did the 2007 redesigns, they asked users what they wanted to be added; 95% said features that were already in Office.

The Ribbon was designed to make features more findable.

Alas.

I prefer the ribbon. It makes everything easier to discover and use.

It's also entirely configurable so i was able to tailor it specifically to my needs, even include button for my macro, logically grouped and not thrown together with no heads or tail in a "macro" submenu.

It also allows widgets with much richer informational content than menus.

The ribbon is also entirely keyboard navigable with visual hints. Which means you can use anything mouse free without having to remember rarely used shortcuts.

And if the ribbon takes too much space, and you can't afford a better screen, you can hide and show it with ctrl-F1 or a click somewhere (probably).

It's actually a much much better UX than menus and submenus and everything hidden and zero adaptability. At least for tools like the office apps with a bazillion functions.

Most copies of the ribbon are utter shit though because the people who copied didn't understand the strength of the office ribbon and only copied the looks superficially.

It's funny to see people still hung up on the ribbon 17 years later.

It's because of people like you that we still use qwerty on row staggered keyboards from the mechanical typewriter era. ;)

I miss 07 jfc...

Related: https://youtu.be/HdozqSVF-VM

Why did this happen?

The cynical but probably truer than we'd like to admit answer is "middle managers who bring nothing to the table but need to 'make big changes' to justify that promotion they've been chasing."

Source: Pretty much all corporations at this point have these people, my sister's ex-husband is one at Google.

What makes it even worse is that screens got wider and shorter, but the new designs use more vertical space than before, leaving even less height to do anything in.

Honestly I like ribbons quite a lot as a design framework and hell, even padding can improve the UX, it's just a shame that neither of these elements have been used well in a decade.

The Ribbon isn't the worst thing. It tried to solve the clutter of the previous interface, although I always preferred the old one.

Here is an interesting take on the problem of modern interfaces: https://datagubbe.se/decusab/

The ribbon is better than menus. They're even customizable. And lots of non-Microsoft software uses ribbons, too.

Plus there's a search function right at the top if you can't find the option you're looking for

I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get "the new ribbon UI!"

The answer was never, incidentally.

View-> Then the little v arrow in the right. Switch to tabs only, the Ribbon UI will now only appear when you click one of the titles like home or View.

The ribbon was introduced in Office 2007. The backsliding started a long time ago.

There's been a trend towards simplicity/minimalism in UX for a long time. Sometimes it works really well. Other times it makes it difficult to find things like setting preferences (or they just don't implement them because the assholes think they know better than you).

For me, MS is a mixed bag. Some of the UX changes are good, some of it is horrible.

But I love a well done minimalist UX. Obsidian and Reaper are two examples that come to mind.

Everyone wanted to compete with Apple

You can use OpenOffice which hasn't adopted any new UI since 1998.