Microsoft has officially announced that their upcoming major operating-system release Microsoft Windows 8 will feature Windows Explorer with "ribbon" interface with sleuths of new features to improve basics of file-management including copy, move, rename, and delete operations.

To incorporate the new functionality and design Windows 8 dev-team took inspiration from existing explorer addons like TeraCopy, FastCopy and QTTabBar2, the dev-team designed the new Windows Explorer ribbon interface taking into consideration the fact that the top 10 commands represent 81.8% of total use via Windows usage telemetry data.

New Windows 8 Ribbon Interface

The team also improved the basic file-management across the platform with new features like the new unified interface to manage all jobs, ability to pause operations, accurate process completion time data, easier file-name conflict resolution and much more. New features images and de,o videos after the jump.

A tabbed file-browser interface is very productive to use and free add-in "QtTabbar" for Windows explorer allows you to do just that, "QtTabbar" also provides tons of customizations, plugins and skins to making it an absolutely must have tool and a delight to use. The latest update to this popular explorer add-in now fully supports Windows 7 with all bells and whistles.

Direct Folders is yet another excellent free software from CodeSector, developers of fast file-copier TeraCopy, The small utility makes use of unused "double-click on empty space" action to pop-up an extensive, useful menu for quick and direct access to your favorite folders and applications directly from Desktop, Explorer or File Open/Save dialog box.

Direct Folders also allows you to automatically resize every standard file open/save dialog, letting you find what you looking for without much scrolling, another such useful feature is its ability to automatically switch the folder views of open dialogs to thumbnails, list or details depending on the application you are working with for example the application can be configured to automatically switch to Thumbnail view if you are working in Photoshop and to details view if working in Notepad, You can even select the preference of file sort order to be the default as well.