While we haven't yet gotten our hands on a Windows 7 build with the new taskbar, we did talk to Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky about the various UI changes and what we can expect at release time.

It's not a surprise that the most disruptive Windows UI change in 15 years comes under the watch of the man largely responsible for the Office ribbon. The ribbon was a jarring change for many users, yet there was no option to turn it off, which made sense to most of us here at Ars. Many people vehemently disagreed with this decision, and we expect to be hearing from them again on the new taskbar. Sinofsky told us that there will be no ability to enable the old taskbar since, in Microsoft's opinion, the new taskbar's leap in usability negates the need for a "less-able" option. While there's not quite as much ingrained taskbar knowledge as there may have been for the various Office toolbars and menus, we expect that this change will be the source of lots of contention.

The Office change seems to have given Microsoft some insight into how its customers will react to disruptive changes, and made the company a little bolder with Windows itself. Ribbon users generally took between 48 hours and 25 days to see productivity gains, and Microsoft is quick to point out how much time many Office users actually spend in front of Excel. The implication is that an aggressive taskbar change won't be quite as hard to adapt to as the Office ribbon may have been for many users.

Sinofsky's comments about historical Windows UI changes were informative. "I think that Windows has had this history of being, sort of, risk averse on change. And frankly, I feel like we just kind of move stuff around a little and never really fundamentally alter it," Sinofsky told Ars. "So people talk about how XP had compatibility mode... it kind of just turned it gray. I mean, it really didn't do all that much to make it that much different".

Over the course of this discussion, we also heard something interesting about the taskbar's jump list feature. "The reason [the jump list feature] is really cool is because it gives a chance to developers to stop annoying customers," Sinofsky said.

Current and previous versions of Windows don't really have a good mechanism for the sort of unobtrusive interaction that jump lists could provide. To highlight the problems this causes, Sinofsky pointed out that even Windows Live messenger has a window for listing buddies, a notification icon with a basic context menu, and it's still a window that can be minimized "with bizarre balloon messages if you close it, reminding you that it's still running." With jump lists, developers can just make the window, minimize it, and do everything in one place, leaving the notification area for... notifications only.

Other Windows 7 UI tidbits

Many of our readers have asked us about multimonitor support for the new Window docking abilities. We asked about that, and it sounds like window docking will behave in a relatively predictable way with multiple-monitor setups. If you watch the video of a single-monitor configuration, you'll notice that dragging a window to one of the side edges of the screen "docks" it, while dragging it to the top edge maximizes it. In a multimonitor configuration, the screen will be treated as one giant space, with one specific exception. The outer side edges will result in a "docked" Window that fills the screen it's on, while the top edge will maximize a window to the current screen. We would have liked to have seen two regions per screen for docking purposes, but they don't seem to have included that.

There are quite a few big UI changes in Windows 7 that are dependent on developers taking advantage of them. Microsoft is going to have to lead the way here, since it's the largest Windows software developer (in addition to, you know, building Windows). Vista had a number of neat features that Microsoft software never took much advantage of; there were no first-party Office sidebar gadgets, for instance. We asked Sinofsky if this would be different for Windows 7, and he basically said that the entire company follows Office, for better or worse, so it will depend on what the Office people do. They have apparently been included in the design process for some of these changes, which may mean that there's some hope in this area.

We're pretty excited to get our hands on the Beta build of Windows 7 that's supposed to be out in January. Microsoft confirmed that the UI changes they demonstrated will be available in that build, so it will give us a good chance to put them through their paces and show them in action.