The next step

Last week's CES saw the announcement of the much anticipated public beta of Windows 7, with 2.5 million license keys promised to beta testers on Friday. Friday arrived, and as is now well-known, Microsoft's servers melted under the load. The key generation is now more or less working, and the 2.5 million limit has been scrapped, so it's time to take a look at what's on offer.

The first public sightings of Windows 7 were at Microsoft's PDC developer conference in October last year. The lead-up to PDC was unusually secretive, with Redmond giving little away about what Windows 7 would actually contain when it shipped, in contrast to the extremely public lead-up to Windows Vista's release. The covers came off at PDC, with the star of the show being Windows 7's new taskbar. Unfortunately, the build that was given out to PDC attendees lacked the new taskbar, so the one feature we all wanted to play with wasn't actually available. The public beta, build number 7000, finally gives us the new shiny taskbar. If all goes well, this will be the only beta Windows 7 gets; a Release Candidate should land some time around April, going RTM in July, and hitting retail two to three months later.

Windows Vista made a lot of changes to the driver model and the display layer, and took a much harder line on security, which was all very necessary work, but which caused a lot of teething trouble in its early days. Windows 7 doesn't undo any of that work; it does, however, build upon it to make using the OS simpler and more refined. The major focus with Windows 7 is how the user interacts with the machine, and so the major work in Windows 7 is to the user interface. Therefore I'll focus mainly on the new interface elements in this brief look. For those more interested in the system administrative perspective, our PDC Coverage would be a good place to start.

The taskbar

The taskbar is probably the defining feature of the Windows user interface. The introduction of the taskbar and Start Menu with Windows 95 was something of a landmark; it was the taskbar more than any other aspect of the Windows 95 UI that made Windows 95 feel modern, leaving Windows 3.11 far behind. While the Start Menu has undergone radical improvements (culminating in Vista's searchable Start Menu, which I can't live without), the taskbar has changed little since its introduction. Minor refinements have been made over the years—the IE4 shell update added the ability to dock special toolbars to the taskbar (most notably the Quick Launch icons), Windows XP added stacking to allow multiple buttons to collapse if the taskbar became too full, and Vista added thumbnails when hovering the mouse—but the basic mechanics of switching between running tasks have remained unaltered.



The new taskbar

Fire up Windows 7 for the first time and the taskbar is pretty much what we saw back in October. No more Quick Launch toolbar, no more button text, just a set of large icons. An icon on the taskbar doesn't necessarily mean that a program is running; programs can be pinned to the taskbar so that their icon is persistent. Clicking the icon starts the program (if it's not running) or switches to it (if it is). If a program has multiple windows, clicking the icon shows a list of thumbnails; clicking the thumbnail switches window.



The new taskbar with multiple windows



Once you get too many windows, you just get a list instead of thumbnails

Though the appearance is quite unlike any previous taskbar, and is liable to cause some consternation among those resistant to change, the basic operation of the taskbar is much the same as it has been in XP. In this regard, the biggest behavioral change is the conflation of running and non-running programs.

Personally, I like this. Whether a program is currently running or not is, to me, a minor detail, and so the mechanism I use to switch to an application should be the same regardless of whether the application is currently running. Forcing me to do one thing (Quick Launch or Start Menu) when the application isn't running, and a second (taskbar) when it is strikes me as unnecessary. With Windows 7, the same approach can be used in both situations; just click the icon.

There are small visual cues to indicate the state of each application; IE (left-most) isn't running, so has no box around the icon. Media Player (second from left) has a single window, so gets a single box. Chrome (third from left) and Explorer (fourth from left) have multiple windows, so they get a kind of stacked box.

The rather vociferous supporters of a certain Cupertino-based company will probably say that this aspect of the new taskbar (in conjunction with its large icons) shows that Microsoft has simply copied Apple. That may be so, but I'm not sure why anyone should care. The new taskbar works better than the old one, and that alone justifies the decisions Microsoft has taken.