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

The most used items have literally been moved from the bottom......to the top. That's all they did, they moved them from the bottom....to the top. You don't even have to click the sub-menu. They literally just moved them CLOSER to your cursor. How are people actually confused by this?

My complaint is actually different. I don't do any of these operations from the shortcut menu; when I open the right-click menu at all, it's to use the less frequent options like "edit with program X" which are no longer visible by default, so I always have to click "Show more options" - which, as a side note, means the full menu now appears relative to where the mouse is when I click "Show more options" and often quite distant from the file list. Nevertheless, having looked through this thread and played around with it for five minutes on my PC, I can give you some reasons.

1. Quite often (about 25-30% of the time in my testing) the buttons just don't show up at all. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for this, A file will not have them one time and then have them when you try again a second later. It seems to happen on the same occasions as other context menu items go missing, so I'm guessing it's just whether it can get the context menu ready to show in xx milliseconds, and when it doesn't all of those things drop off including the icons. (If you have copied something, instead of no icons you get just the paste icon.)
2. Sometimes they are at the top of the list, sometimes they are at the bottom. Seems to be that if the item you are clicking is in the top half of the screen (not the Explorer window), the icons appear at the top, but if it's in the bottom half, they appear at the bottom. When they appear at the bottom, the menu grows upwards from the bottom also, so the icons are still near your cursor, but this is not intuitive behaviour and needs to be specifically trained for - which makes it a headache for anyone trying to write documentation or talk someone through it over the phone.
3. Cut and Delete icons are OK; Share is arguably common enough to be OK, although I'd dispute that it needs to be there at all; I don't think the Rename icon works at all. Copy is arguably OK but you'll only guess Paste if you're used to seeing that icon for Paste in other programs. Visually it looks like adding something to the clipboard, which is of course Copy. So I can understand people getting these mixed up.

But seriously people, learn the shortcut keys and you'll never look back :D

There are some nice things about the design. For instance, whether the icons show up at the top or the bottom of the list, their horizontal position is just a little below your mouse, so you can get a consistent muscle memory going once you know what to look for. (But why not make it in line with the mouse position?) And I agree that something had to be done about context menus with actions from 20 different programs in them. But I feel like the kinds of users who have that problem are also the kinds of users who could cope with the capability that used to exist in Windows to manage the actions available for each file type. If that interface had been improved a bit (e.g. defaulting to a view of the actions registered for all file types, and having an easy way to reorder and delete) I think it would have been a better solution - although I recognise it does not align with the UI strategy of simplifying everything.

But then, that's the point; sometimes simpler UI is not better. Or rather, "simpler" UI is often a misnomer, where some things are simplified and other things are made more complicated (sometimes much more complicated). If the balance of these is right it can be a good change, but if the balance is wrong it can actively make things worse. For anyone who has to do a lot of the things that are more complicated, it will be a bad change.

Too many clowns with time on their hands changing the most-used menu to a secondary menu. Absolutely idiotic.

Agree, and with my vision issues those little buttons are useless for me.

I found this on Microsoft's site. Worked like a charm, I'm back to the 'Ugly' but useful context menu: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restore-legacy-right-click-menu-for-file-explorer/a62e797c-eaf3-411b-aeec-e460e6e5a82a Don't forget to restart Windows Explorer in Task Manager...

Yes, I didn't even notice the icons at first and was annoyed it was now taking an extra click on the "Show More Options" to find it. Just another stupid move by Microsoft.