I’ve had a few days to have a good play with Windows 8 now, and I’m beginning to wonder if Microsoft’s new operating system might not be undoing a lot of the good work they did with Windows 7. Now I’m going to stress here that this is pre-release software, not even a beta yet, and as such a significant amount of things with the operating system will change. However I am visiting Microsoft’s UK head office on Monday and meeting with the head of Windows there, who is bound to ask me what I think of Windows 8.
Notifications in XP and Vista were a real pain, and most people complained about them. With Windows 7 Microsoft introduced not only a new notifications area, but also the Action Centre. With the notifications area it suddenly became a quick and simple operation to silence unwanted applications, and highlight others. The Action Centre meanwhile aggregated all your alerts and would most commonly notify you by adding a cross to the notification flag. This was elegant and quite easy to spot.
Windows 8's metro UI doesn’t, as yet, have alternatives to these and the pop ups are back with a bong. I say this because where some alerts would previously play a sound to tell you they were there, all alerts in Windows 8 play a sound. All these alerts too, and this ought to change too, currently appear to be green (at least I’ve not seen any in other colours). While this might be the default colour for the Developer Preview (we can expect other colours to be available to us) it doesn’t help us distinguish the critical and important notification from the unimportant ones.
Many things are also too spread out in the new Metro UI. To give you one example, if you want to search you no longer have to open the Start Menu, you can just type, which is great. But if you want to search for, say Settings, then you have to click something in the very top right of the screen. The Application you want could very well appear in the very top left of the screen and if you then want to perform an action on it, such as running it as an administrator, you have to click something in the very bottom right of the screen.
While this might be okay for touch use, though it’s still a bit much, it’s far too much work for using a mouse. There are other examples where things are too spread out elsewhere in the UI and this is something that may change for the beta.
Microsoft have spent the last ten years now trying to encourage us to have a tidy desktop, something of while I wholeheartedly approve. The new Metro UI though can quickly become cluttered if you start installing your Windows desktop software. All the installed icons will appear here including extra utilities and uninstallers. I’m wondering how many Windows 8 users will know that they can unpin icons from the Start Screen, how many will realise they can reorganise icons into groups and, most importantly, how many will bother to do so. This could lead to some very messy desktops and users having problems, ala Windows 98, where things become difficult for them to find.
This is something I fully expect will change in the coming months. One of the most useful features in Windows 7 was the jumplists on taskbar icons. Being able to pin files to these and easily access both pinned and recently accessed files is something that a great many people find extremely useful. In Metro there’s no way, as yet, to access recent files and no way to pin files to programs. If I want to open a spreadsheet I will have to first open a new Excel document.
It’s fantastic news that Windows finally includes anti-virus software and I wholeheartedly approve of the way Microsoft Security Essentials / Windows Defender and Windows Update manage and maintain your system automatically. However I can’t help feel that moving these features so far into the background of the computer will make people complacent about them, and create much bigger problems for users should something go wrong with any automatic updating.
The ribbon is now everywhere in Windows 8 on the desktop and I’ve found it really excellent and easy to use. However the standard interface in Metro is much more limited and, on a large screen, simply too big and not scalable. It’s suitable for software that just runs simple tasks but not for anything more complex, which is probably the vast majority of Windows software. For these packages I’m wondering why Microsoft didn’t announce a metro version of the ribbon at their developer conference? Such a thing could work extremely well in Metro, but the problem is compounded further by rumours that the next version of Office only ‘may’ be released for Metro.
My final quibble is that many operations that formerly took one click, such as switching between browser tabs, now takes two or three. There are just too many simple and basic Windows operations that have had levels of complexity added to them, especially trying to switch off Windows 8 with a mouse; something else I expect to change soon. Search as I detailed above is an excellent example here with the Start Menu and Explorer search in Windows 7 being elegant, simple and comprehensive. This just isn’t the case now.
Other people may complain that the Metro UI is too plain, or that all the black feels oppressive. These are also valid comments for a UI that works well on a phone, but perhaps not so well scaled up to the full desktop.
As I’ve said, and I’ll stress this again, this is not even a beta yet and so very much will change in the next six months. I hope many of the issues I’ve detailed here are addressed, otherwise it’s possible that people will just consider Windows 8 a big step backwards from its predecessor, and that would be a crying shame.
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