we had meaningful, sensibly grouped, sets of standard icons, but graphics designers got bored and thought those should be updated.
i like the ribbon but i think standard icons are better.
That joke seriously made my day! Where is the global settings/properties menu for Firefox? Photoshop? Eclipse? Premiere Pro? Android Studio?
Between those 5 apps, some of the same category or even same vendor, you can find that one very ubiquitous entry under: Tools, File, Window, Edit, File but there's 4 of them.
On Mac OS for example the "Preferences" item is always in the same location and has the same shortcut, throughout first party and third party apps.
see? that's part of what i was trying to say. you say settings, i think cog, hamburger menu, or even three dots. it's so hard lately because designers want to innovate and make their UI different.
Come on; the normal method to find the function you needed when you didn't know the icon was to hover them all one-by-one.
> For example, almost any command in a document creating and authoring program could belong in tabs labeled Edit, Format, Tools, Options, Advanced, and More.
Guess what menus Word used?
All of the buttons on the ribbon have labels, except for very common ones on the Home tab. That's one of the main tenets of the ribbon. As compared to toolbars, which made very little use of labels at all.
I see ribbon as an alternative to the menubar plus toolbar layout, more than visual style.
That would be fine, as long as it's possible to completely hide the ribbon.