— aka.spvn

So despite not having installed Windows 7 beta the day it got leaked onto the Internet (I was too lazy to partition my iMac hard drive), I finally got around to installing it and finally running it, with much difficulty. I’m typing this now in Firefox on Windows 7 beta build 7000, and thus far it’s more or less a love/hate relationship with this OS. I’ve heard so much good stuff about this beta that I expected it to do wonders, unfortunately it seems my expectations might have been a tad bit too high.

A Whole New Taskbar

Reviewers all over the net have been gushing about their love for the new taskbar, some going so far as to saying it’s the “best of both worlds” from both the traditional Windows taskbar as well as Mac OSX’s iconic Dock. In my opinion, this new taskbar isn’t exactly the best that the taskbar could be. The traditional Windows taskbar was intuitive the first few times you used it, as was Mac OSX’s Dock. Windows 7′s taskbar on the other hand will take some getting used to.

For example, when using the new IE 8 beta, it displays thumbnail previews of every single open tab instead of having one thumbnail preview for the entire window, which a major plus point. However, this means that one cannot simply hit the IE icon in the taskbar and have it pop up with the last closed window. Instead, you have to hover your mouse over the icon (or click it), let the thumbnails surface, then click on the one you want to open. Either way you do it, it takes more time (because there’s a lag between the time you hover your mouse over the icon and when the thumbnails actually pop up) or more clicks (2 clicks + time taken to figure out which tab you last had open). Microsoft really needs to at least give the user the option to revert this simple act of “opening a minimised window” to how it was done in the past. I sent a feedback in to Microsoft about this behaviour, but I’m not quite sure if they’ll even bother about my feedback, seeing as how I’ve never seen any other person talk about it.

UPDATE: This doesn’t only affect IE, but any application with multiple windows open. For example if you have your Firefox download box open alongside your usual browsing window, it’ll take you 2 clicks and longer to open your browser instead of simply clicking once on the taskbar. I’ve sent another feedback to Microsoft which I’ll post here soon in a separate post since it’s quite long.

Your Naggy OS

First, the way so many other reviewers described the OS it seemed like Windows 7 finally stopped being the naggy OS that Windows Vista was, for example allowing users to toggle how stringent they wanted the naggy UAC to be. That sounds like a brilliant feature obviously, but in reality, the ability to toggle that setting isn’t really that useful at all. There are only 4 different levels available to choose from, and the system defaults to the second highest setting. However, the only difference between the default setting and the third highest setting is that the background applications no longer dim out, allowing you to interact with them. However, the naggy UAC screen still pops up at exactly the same frequency as the default setting, which makes this feature quite useless. The lowest security setting completely disables the naggy screen (which is what I’ve chosen) and I don’t even want to find out how naggy UAC becomes on the highest setting.

Really, I expected Microsoft to find some way to make it such that the naggy screen only pops up when a suspicious program is opened, instead of asking a user if he/she is sure he/she wants to do any action. Apparently, they finally realised that the OS should only confirm an action when it’s initiated by software instead of by the user (ie. it won’t ask you if you’re sure you want to open a program like, say, Notepad), which is what they should have thought of doing in Vista in the first place. However, I’m still suffering annoyances, and this is on the 2nd lowest level, when I try to install programs like Firefox. So for me, I’m just going to completely switch it off for now.

Why hide the menu?

If I’m not wrong, Vista did this as well, but I’m not a hundred percent certain seeing as how I’m coming from XP (I never bothered with Vista, and that’s a story for another time). In Windows 7, the traditional menu bar (no idea what it’s “officially” called) isn’t there on most Window applications. I’m referring to the one with the “File”, “Edit”, Tools”, “Help”, etc menu buttons. Windows XP had these permenantly visible no matter what application you’re using, however with Windows 7 it’s only permenantly visible in third party applications like Firefox. Stuff like Windows Live messenger and even Internet Explorer have the menu bar permenantly hidden. The only way to reveal it is to hit the Alt key or F10, which is pretty stupid.

Why in the world would Windows want to hide it by default? Even the most casual and technologically illiterate person has grown accustomed to searching for the menu bar at the top of the window, so if this is an attempt at making Windows more user friendly, it’s a huge step backwards. Not to mention it’s annoying for seasoned Windows users to have to hit a key first before being able to see it. I’m sure there’s some tweak available out there which will show the menu bar, but why have it hidden by default?

Not too shabby Redmond…

All in all though, Windows 7 is a really great operating system thus far, and the only reason why I’m listing such negative . Plenty of stuff is working, but minor graphical glitches and other small bugs are constant reminders that this is a still a beta. However, the gripes I listed above are definitely not related to it being a beta, but they’re stuff that are obviously planned for the final release. I really hope some of them gets changed, especially my first gripe.

Still, Windows 7 looks to be the OS that will finally get me off XP (and finally enter the world of DirectX 10).