The Windows 7 user interface is only subtly different from Windows Vista, with pinned icons on the Taskbar, Jump Lists for recent files and common tasks, and gadgets scattered wherever you want them
Microsoft has never been so secretive about a new version of Windows for so long.
Windows 7 is finally being unveiled at the Professional Developers Conference, but we got to try out the Milestone 3 pre-beta version that attendees will take home, as well as getting a sneak peak at the next internal version and the new user interface.
Read on for our Windows 7 pre-beta build review.
The internals of Windows 7 don’t have the big architectural changes of Vista – or the compatibility problems, claims Steve Sinofsky, Senior Vice President for Windows. Or as he puts it: “I don’t believe you have to break things to have big changes.”
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It’s not clear how big the changes are so far. If you put the beta-build of Windows 7 side-by-side with Windows Vista, you’d be hard-pressed to spot the differences. Yes, some of the icons look slightly different and there’s no sidebar, but it’s essentially still the Vista look and feel. But that changes when you start to use Windows 7.
For a start the OS won’t nag you as much; many notifications are banished to a control panel, you get to approve icons before they show up in the system tray and Microsoft has reined in Vista’s useful but annoying UAC prompts; you can choose which ones you want to see or turn them off altogether.
The Windows 7 interface
Run your mouse along the taskbar, and you get the option of full screen previews of any minimised windows – including all the tabs open in Internet Explorer, along with the ability to close applications directly from the preview. No, you can’t already do that in Vista, it just feels so natural and intuitive that you assume it’s always been there.
Jump Lists simplify working with applications, showing recent and frequently used documents, as well as common tasks for some applications. These are more efficient, they put what you’re most likely to want to do at your fingertips – but they won’t suit everyone.
In fact Jump Lists are literally at your fingertips; on a touchscreen you can swipe your finger over an icon to open the Jump List. You can also scroll through web pages, flick through photos, pinch and stretch your fingers to zoom and twiddle them around to rotate a photo – or you can literally finger-paint in Paint. These are the same kind of simple gestures Apple has pioneered and they’re easy to use, as long as you have a touchscreen.
Networking in Windows 7
The HomeGroup is Microsoft’s attempt at making home networking easy, rather like the Castle feature that was dropped from early betas of Vista. With a simple wizard-driven approach to network connections and to file and folder sharing, HomeGroups are the home user equivalent of Windows 3.11 workgroups. They’ve been a long time coming – and Microsoft seems to have come up with an idiot-proof network, thanks to password-controlled connections.
Eerily reminiscent of the doomed WinFS concept planned for Vista, Libraries bring folders with common content together – making it easier to track down images, music or documents. If you’re using a HomeGroup home network, Library content can also include files stored on other networked PCs – and you can play music and videos on other PCs and devices remotely, as long as they support DLNA 1.5, like the Sonos Zone Player.
This Play To feature works well because of the improved codec support, including DIVX and XVID, HD ABC and Apple’s AAC – letting you share iTunes libraries with Windows or Linux users, as long as they’re not DRM-locked FairPlay songs.
Devices get a glossy new interface in this Milestone 3 pre-beta version of Windows 7 too. Device Stage is a new way of bringing together all the applications and services that can be used with a device onto one branded screen, whether it’s a camera, a multi-function printer or a mobile phone.
Getting connected to Wi-Fi or 3G will be easier in Windows 7, with a menu that lists all the access points that pops up right from the system tray. Bluetooth also gets a makeover, with improved (and simplified) device discovery and a built-in A2DP driver.
Windows 7 applications
Microsoft has abandoned the ultimately disappointing Vista Ultimate Extras, along with the native Vista accessories that are duplicated as Windows Live tools. Mail, Photo Gallery, Messenger and similar tools will be the ‘wave three’ Windows Live versions that you can already try in beta; and if what Brian Hall, the General Manager for Windows Live, calls “really fundamental changes” keep Movie Maker in beta for longer than Windows 7, you’ll get the beta version.
That certainly avoids the confusion of having up to three different versions of Messenger, only one of which gets regular updates, and the free Outlook Connector means you don’t have to wonder why you’d need to pay for MSN to get your Hotmail messages in Outlook. But good as they are – and the image correction tools in Windows Live Photo Gallery are good enough to mean you’ll rarely need an image editing tool unless you’re feeling very picky – the so-called Live Essentials tools don’t really feel like an integral part of Windows 7.
When will Windows 7 ship?
Steve Sinofsky maintains that Windows 7 will ship no later than three years after Windows Vista, which puts the release between November 2009 and February 2010. Beta 1 is due to come out in January 2009, with a series of other beta and release candidate versions to follow.
Those betas are unlikely to be available to the general public; Microsoft is taking feedback on reliability, compatibility and performance from PC and device manufacturers and software companies as well as telemetry from the PDC pre-beta users – and everyone in the Windows team.
“I haven’t had a Vista machine in my presence for six months,” Sinofsky says. By making sure that they have a usable version at the end of each development milestone, his team have been able to run Windows 7 while they’re developing it.
There’s a lot that’s not finalised in Windows 7 and while Milestone 3 is perfectly usable it currently feels like a slicker and sleeker version of Vista. While Sinofsky calls M3 “substantially complete” and a lot of people inside Microsoft and at various partners are already running it, what he means is it has all the APIs the developers will use.
Microsoft hasn’t yet decided how many versions of Windows 7 there will be or what will be in them. Windows 7 is already at M3 and there’s still what Executive Communications Manager Peter McKiernan calls “spirited debate” about whether to have a separate OEM folder to segregate the software that PC suppliers like Dell often stuff machines with.
Windows 7 performance
Microsoft isn’t making any specific performance claims about Windows 7, but Gabriel Aul of the Windows Performance team says that “if a system runs Windows Vista it should run Windows 7 faster and a notebook that runs Vista should get better battery life on Windows 7″.
Startup is certainly speedy; under five seconds on a Lenovo Thinkpad 300 with an SSD. Part of that is initialising more devices in parallel, but Windows 7 also delays loading any services it doesn’t need immediately; so you won’t be waiting for the Bluetooth service when you start up, but you will be waiting for it when you don a Bluetooth headset or a set of A2DP headphones (both of which Windows 7 supports out of the box).
If you use a large screen and open a lot of windows, this won’t take up nearly as much memory. Even with over 50 windows open, Windows 7 doesn’t feel sluggish until you open Internet Explorer 8 (which, to be fair, is still in beta itself). We opened over 100 windows without seeing the usual Vista error message about having to revert to Aero Basic.
Windows 7 netbooks
While Sinosfksy won’t be drawn on system requirements so early on, he claims Windows 7 runs on systems you wouldn’t dream of using with Vista:
“We’re really quite pleased internally with performance of Windows 7 even on what we today consider to be low-end netbooks; the ones that run with an Atom processor, the ones that have a gigabyte of RAM. I’ll show you the machine I use as my primary machine and I think you’ll be surprised.”
That’s certainly a welcome change from Vista. But the really surprising thing about Windows 7 is that the individually small improvements add up to so much of a difference.