Random Flux

I’ve been playing around with Windows 7 for ever a week now and I have to say that this time Microsoft really got it right. It’s everything that Vista should have been and it’s probably the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced. The only downside is Internet Explorer 8, which is worse than ever. Hopefully the errors are bugs, if not life is going to get a lot harder for web designers, yet again.

With Apple working so hard to piss off their users (matte screen on 17″ only and costs more, no more firewire on the Macbook, only one firewire port on the 15″, non-removable battery on the 17″) Windows 7 is a welcome breath of fresh air. If Apple don’t clean up their act I may be switching back to Windows machines again real soon.

Windows 7 is a pleasure to install, virtually everything seems to work immediately and it runs beautifully on low-end hardware. I have it running on an MSI Wind netbook and it feels subjectively faster than Windows XP on the same machine, even with the full transparent Aero interface running.

It’s the first version of Windows ever where you get the feeling that people who really understand user interfaces, usability and good design have had a major say in the interface. It’s beautiful to look at, a pleasure to use and all of the eye candy is functional as well as attractive. With Vista you had to work to get used to it and force yourself to like it, Windows 7 I feel at home in right away.

Windows 7 is full of clever little tweaks that make it more intuitive, efficient and fun to use. Move the mouse pointer to the right end of the taskbar and all the windows on the screen become transparent, allowing you to see the desktop. Mouseover an application in the taskbar and you get usable thumbnail previews of all the documents open in the application. Mouseover these previews and you get a full-size preview. Drag two document windows to the left and right margins of the screen and they automatically fill the left and right halves of the screen so that you can compare them.

The new taskbar merges the functions of the quick access toolbar and the taskbar, working more like Apple’s dock in OS X — but with some features that the dock doesn’t have. Once you get used to it, it’s at least as good as the dock, possibly better. I’ll reserve final judgement on that until I’ve used it longer.

Power management on Windows 7 is outstanding out of the box. With0ut any adjustments I’m getting better battery life than with XP.

The dark side: Internet Explorer, still the world’s worst browser

Forget about all the new features and capabilities of Internet Explorer 8, some of which are actually quite good. They are  irrelevant because IE is still the world’s worst browser. Not only is it still not standards-compliant, it introduces new and different errors that are going to force web designers to program around yet another buggy Microsoft browser in different ways. For example, dimensions and the CSS box model appear to be interpreted in non-standard ways, but different non-standard ways than in IE7 and earlier. Complex CSS selectors that work in all other browsers, including IE7, are ignored in IE 8.

Microsoft has added an “IE7 compatibility mode” that web developers can activate in their pages with a meta tag and in their sites with .htaccess settings. However, MS is also in the process of botching this half-assed solution as well so prospects don’t look good. In the words of Simon the Geek:

Yes Microsoft we appreciate your efforts in getting your browser to work properly, but we have spent the last 12 years bodging our sites together so that they display properly in your old programs, and your new baby plays by it’s own rules, so now we have to go back over everything….thanks.

If Microsoft doesn’t get this cleaned up before the release of IE8, with or without Windows 7, they can be expect to be visited by mobs of web designers with baseball bats and pitchforks. Otherwise Windows 7 is a winner.