Revamped Ribbon-based File Manager Coming to Windows 8

Microsoft has been divulging quite a bit of information on its upcoming Windows 8 OS on its official development blog, and the juicy tidbits don’t seem to have an end in sight. In a new update, the company has gone into great detail about the improvements that the Explorer file manager will be seeing, which not too surprisingly, will introduce a ribbon bar – a la Office

This ribbon was designed with the help of telemetry data that Microsoft acquired through its users that opted to have their usage tracked. As the company discovered, out of the 200 or so options available in Explorer, about 10 of them accounted for 80% of the usage. These include things like Copy, Paste, Cut, Delete, Rename and so forth.

With that all in mind, the buttons were laid out in such a way that they’d feel natural to any user, and judging by the screenshots, I’d have to say that things are looking quite good. At first glance, the upgrades look like little more than just the addition of a ribbon, but compared to 7 or Vista, the improvements go far beyond that.

For example, the “File” menu is visible from the get-go, as opposed to having to be enabled in Vista or 7. Inside this menu users will have the option to open up a command prompt already cd’d to that particular folder (thank you, Microsoft!), and things like history can be cleared.

Further, certain folders will have different options up top. In “Computer”, for example, things like Format, Defrag, Cleanup and so forth will be available. You can expect similar themes for Control Panel, Documents, Pictures, Music and others.

What do you guys think? I find that with the move to Vista, some of the neat features of XP’s file manager were lost, but with this ribbon, Microsoft is restoring what was lost, and is at the same time improving things quite a bit. Maybe I am jumping to conclusions though. Best to wait for some hands-on time before coming up with those.