Windows 11 File Explorer Right-click Menu was changed to include icons

Unfortunately, it is no more or less predictable than the old context menu. it can appear top, bottom, left or right. Given that I do not add applications continually to my laptop, the location of the words in the old context menus were consistently in the same place. Now many of the things that I want in the context menu are in the "Show more options" - a massive scroll to the bottom and an additional mouse click - you really want to talk about lost productivity? I am pretty sure that anyone who has used a computer for more than week is familiar with the words "cut copy paste" - not sure that they had to resort to pictures so that we could all understand the concept. The pictures in themselves are not at all intuitive so you have to mouse over them to see what they are, and so far as I have been able to ascertain, their location is also context sensitive - so not always in the same place. I realize that this is a discussion with no winner - MS will do what it wants and continue to make changes for the sake of making changes so that their developers can feel like they should keep their jobs (don't even get me started on the new location of the nav bar in Outlook).

I think that overall it's an improvement but you have to see it from the perspective of Microsoft. They have roughly 1,400,000,000 users. Without this change, right click copy, paste, etc appears in some random spot on the screen which means an inconsistent move of the mouse often a long way from the point clicked. The more frequently it's done, the more time is lost. I know. Fractions of seconds. But the daily loss in productivity over that many users is enormous.

If used frequently, it quickly becomes second nature. If not, it takes a small amount of adjustment before becoming second nature. But overall, now time saved will be much greater than the time lost adjusting.

Consider it from the perspective of somebody who hasn't used Windows before. If that was the case, I think it's pretty clear that this is preferable. It's always going to be at the same spot a couple of inches to the side of where you right click And normally on the right unless you're so far against the right side of the screen that it has to go to the left. And it uses an icon instead of words that have to be read.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy. I'm over 50 years old and I've been using Windows since they rolled out Windows 3.1. In my opinion They should have begun this with the launch of Windows 10. It should have been defaulted to the off position with a registry edit to turn it on so they could work all the bugs out. They should have been pushing software makers for the last several years to support it so that by now most if not all third party manufacturers or software would already support it. Then by the time 11 rolled out, It would have been complete. At that point they should have provided a setting to activate it and promoted it so that people knew about it. Then people could easily adopt it based on whether or not they wanted to.

So I do agree that they dropped the ball on it and by providing a registry edit instead of a settings option to change it, it complicated things for those who have no desire to change to it. So It definitely could have been handled better.

I too am all for positive change; it is too bad that this change does NOT fall into the positive category. I never had any problem with the old context menu, but maybe I did not have an overkill of extra products that were using it. Positive change occurs when you add functionality in an upwards compatible manner without removing or detracting from the existing functionality. Forcing administrators to rewrite manuals, etc. etc. by foisting a non-compatible change is absolutely a negative change. By all means campaign for your "power user" or whatever it is that you want, just leave the rest of us alone with our pedestrian interface that does what we want the way we want it to.

Incredibly annoying to have to spend time looking for this answer. Adding clicks to an extremely common process, for no reason - genius. Give that UX person a raise.

Not sure which part you need, but it shows Windows 11 Pro, version is 21H2.

Also says OS Build: 22000.795 and Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.22000.795.0

Our IT group has just started giving out replacement laptops with Windows 11 so there are just a handful of us as guinea pigs.

I do know there's some consistency issues and also issues with various software providers not making their software available on the new menu. It's unfortunate because we didn't have much chance to work through bugs before they rolled it out. It's a complete rework of the right-click menu which is long overdue. Normally they would roll out such changes by making it optional, where it could be enabled by editing the registry. Here, they chose to do it the other way around and enable it by default and providing a way to disable it.

My guess is that although it benefits "power users" the most, the lack of 3rd party software makers supporting it for the moment limits that usefulness and pushes most of them to revert to the old menu. My guess is that they enabled it by default to prevent development from getting bogged down through lack of use. By doing it this way they can get more feedback much faster through regular telemetry, theoretically reducing the dev time to get it right while lighting a fire under the rears of other software companies to start fully supporting it.

Overall it's a sound, yet somewhat annoying way to go about it. This is something that should have been addressed in the early days of Win10 but It's likely the result would have been the same. The way we use machines now is totally different than the early days. Nearly every installation requires some level of customization. This right-click menu has long been a "third-rail" that everyone wanted fixed while no one wanted to deal with the fallout. So I have to give them credit for finally doing it even if it's a long way from perfect. They at least had enough sense to provide a simple way to disable it and revert back to the old right-click menu.
Just open a terminal window, paste the line below, hit enter, then when it confirms it completed, reboot.

To disable:
reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

To enable:
reg.exe delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}" /f