Another First Look at Longhorn

WindowsDevCenter.com has a alpha preview of Longhorn the decididly unimpressive new operating sytem from Microsoft.

the good:

the sidebar as a place for dropping applets that intergrate with the OS.

minimising the sidebar so it takes up less room.

Sync manager, allowing easy backup of data.

the bad:

The sidebar takes up alot of room (but might still come out as a benefit overall).

Window title bars, these seem to take up a truely ridiculous amount of room. They are simply a waste of space for not benefit. A very good example of this waste, the sync manager

The 3d window stacking. Notice in the screenshot while you can in this instance see all of the windows this might not always be the case for some combinations of window positions, such as a small window behind the centre of a large window. Note the small tab of window at the lower edge of the stack, it is almost invisible now and would not take much to obscure completly, by moving it's position on the screen upwards a little.

This feature seems to assume that all the windows will be aof approximately equal size. Which is perhaps a good assumption as many windows users keep all their windows maximised. It is also strange that they need this feature, which requires alot of processing, just to add something like drop dhadows onto windows. A useful visual indicator of stacking order, but not one that should take up this much processor power. Mac OS X has had it for ages and runs fine on a 300Mhz processor without hardware acceleration.

IE is still not up to par, the article states it does not have tabs, and according to the article does not seem to offer any improvements over the SP2 version. Certainly nothing about it finally becoming stantards compliant. This is not suprising considering that they have stopped IE development as a distinct product.