New Explorer Features in Windows 8

Posted by Todd on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

There is a great post over on the Building Windows 8 Blog on the new explorer features.

A couple of features that really stand out for me, the new Ribbon and File Menu.

 
First off, they talk about stats. One of those stats is the most commonly entered commands and how they are invoked. Here is a graph of the most common commands called.

Paste doesn’t surprise me as the most used command. What does surprise me is the properties is #2. I figured it would be Copy, Delete or Cut which end up as 3,4 and 7. So they changed the Ribbon menu to reflect this as seen below. Of those only two were on the ribbon bar, so they changed the ribbon bar so that users didn’t have to go looking for the commands.

 

The file menu has also been fixed up and an awesome feature which I love already, for invoking the command prompt; a separate, run as admin menu option.

 

Widescreens

They also mention they are optimizing this for wider screens which are common place now. If you have an LCD, chances are now its a 16X9 or some sort of widescreen fashion. Microsoft’s stats say that 1366 x 768 is the most common screen resolution.

The video that goes along with this is Building Windows 8 – Windows Explorer Features. Or check out the blog at Building Windows 8 Blog