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

The entire UI/UX team that dreamed up this garbage should be fired. Whatever senior leadership that greenlit this to be included in Win11 should also be fired. This is just absolutely awful not to mention those with low level visual impairments are going to be struggling to determine the difference in icons. Just fire anyone associated with this hot mess, they clearly have zero business making products for the general public.

those icos are so terrible, they just don't explain by their look what they do.

TERRIBLE implementation,

it should be optional to turn on/off

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.

Count me in as one of those users who actually appreciates it and doesn't have an issue with positive change. I think it was a stroke of GENIUS, but for the naysayers, let me explain why....

You have to go back to WIN95 to truly understand the issue. The goal was to make it easy to cut, copy, and paste. In Win95 it looked like this:

More continued to be added - for convenience of course - and XP looked like this:

Note how they continue to move down the list. This still wasn't so bad. But by Win10, it became impossible to prioritize over all of the items that get added by default by various software vendors. Forcing it to be ALWAYS at the top would have left millions of users griping about the change - particularly admins of small companies. It would have moved to the top, appearing ahead of open, search, explore, extract, open with, sent to, etc in the above example while separating it from other file level operations like create shortcut, delete, rename, etc. Alternatively it would have been left bouncing around to various different places which also would have been a mess. They would have essentially had to toy with the inner workings of Windows to give it a separate priority level which would create a confusing location for it that changed frequently based on what you were doing and likely would have opened a whole new mess of problems.

So with WIN10, it created right-click menus that looked like mine.

I had to right click, move the mouse to the bottom, then repeatedly click the down arrows 8 times to get to cut/copy/paste.

In retrospect, when it was initially designed it would have been great to have a settings option where one could manually re-order each menu type but the complexity at the time would have slowed Windows down for something that was not really needed at the time. Making such a change now would create so much redesign work at the base level that it would likely cause far too many side-effects which would take years to work through.

So they came up with a solution that works and one that I'm very excited about which is what we see. We have a small bar of icons at the top for these file level operations which will ALWAYS be in the same position at the top but only takes up a single line of space! I've been around and involved in Alpha and Beta testing with Windows long enough that I can really appreciate the thought that went into this. Granted, what they should have done was left the text options for it as well but then I'm sure there would be a lot of complaining about redundancy lol.

So I'm excited about it. I no longer have to deal with that right-click menu above, and I don't have to go through any complex hoops to force it to be easier to use. I don't have to trade off pushing a bunch of other stuff to the bottom and having to scroll for it either. For me, making the change from right-click/move the mouse down until I get to cut/copy/paste to right click, move up a bit to the right took a bit to get used to but after a few days it drastically improved the efficiency of my work and that's exactly the kind of changes I've been hoping for in Win11.

But as they often do, they left the means for those who don't want to adopt it a method of restoring the previous method by editing the registry. It's a much simpler edit to put it back than it is to move those functions elsewhere manually. I'm hoping they'll act on a separate suggestion that I and many others have been pushing for which is a "Power Menu" or PowerToy for advanced users that makes it easier to make changes to the most common registry edits like this without actually having to access the registry directly. Back in the day, the registry was that place where only the brave and experienced admins would go. But over the years it's become a customization place to fix minor annoyances for many who shouldn't be toying with things at the registry level where one wrong move can brick your system. So rather than gripe about the change, I urge anyone who wants to "put it back" to instead push for a separate PowerMenu that makes it easy to make changes to such things without having to resort to directly accessing the registry.