1,001 Things I Hate About Windows Vista #5: IE7

Bleccchh!!! ‘Nuff said.

Oh, okay. I’ll try to control my stomach long enough to be slightly more specific.

• No menus! (Has someone gone nuts at Microsoft?)
  
• Skimpy, non-configurable toolbar.
• Cramped, ugly, unusable Tabs.
• Lack of Tab tools.
• Lack of extensions.
• Near-impossibility of creating extensions.
• Total absence of new usability features.
• Ugly as s**t.
• Still way too much of a system hog.
• After years of development, no meaningful improvements.

IE7 reminds me way too much of Vista as a whole: tarted up with silly window-dressing, and totally devoid of any real concern with usability.

Compare Firefox: simple, clear, unpretentious; loaded to the gunwales with features that actually improve your quality of life… and supported by a vast base of users who keep making it better and better, on almost a daily basis. Small, light, easy to install, easy to maintain, easy to configure and tweak.

In short, IE7 is perhaps the single most totally disappointing ‘upgrade’ to come along with Vista. Oh, and one other ‘genuine advantage:’ if you’re not careful, you’ll end up with it even on Windows XP. (Yet another excellent reason to keep Automatic Updates firmly disabled.)

1,001 Things I Hate About Windows Vista #4: Wasted Space

On a day-to-day basis, this is what I hate MOST about Vista: how it arrogantly wastes screen space.

Screen space is one of the most precious resources on any computer. Even if you’re running a 2560×1600 monster, those little pixels cost money, and there are never enough of them. When your screen starts to fill up with junk, you want to know that it’s useful junk, not just some idiotic crap that serves no purpose.

Vista uses screen space more wastefully than any previous OS. Just to display a file listing, it throws away about an inch and a half at the top of every Explorer window, to display controls I never use. Gone is the useful, simple, compact menu bar, which displays a maximum number of options in a minimum of space. Now you’ve got a big border (without even the former justification of showing the window title!), a Search field (even when you’re not searching for anything), a button bar (that works like a menu but takes up more room), and, most idiotic of all, column headings (even when you’re in a List view that doesn’t have any columns!!!). The “optional” menu bar, which you will need, is on top of all that.

Could this be any dumber??

Why, yes. Yes it could. Remember, this is Vista.

Check the bottom of the window. The nice, neat little status bar, that offered so much useful info in a single line, is now replaced by a gargantuan status “Panel,” complete with neat little headings, info you never use (“Shared with: Everyone”), and a little thumbnail (that repeats the one already shown in huge size in the main window!!). And believe it or not, that’s the best case! Check the next screen cap: about a hectare of baby-blue shaded vacancy, plus a huge, utterly meaningless icon, to tell me there are “35 items” in the window!! Arrrrggghhh!!!!

But it goes on. You can also display a tree panel at the left, and a preview pane at the right. By this point, I can only assume you’re looking at one file icon in a little keyhole in the middle of your monitor.

Does it look nice? Oh, sure. Gorgeous. But could it have all been designed to work efficiently, and still look good? Hell, yeah! By anyone who actually gave a cr@p about usability. Clearly, that no longer includes the new marketing-driven Microsoft. Vista is like an aging whore: thick layers of makeup smeared on top of a commodity that is way past its “best by” date.

If I could moderate Vista’s cavalier usage of my monitor, I could almost live with it. Though I’d still hate it for about 1,000 other reasons. Not to mention on principle.

1,001 Things I Hate About Windows Vista #3: Being Fooled

I love motorcycles. I particularly love air-cooled motorcycles; once you add water cooling, it’s a two-wheeled car. So one thing I really hate are water-cooled motorcycles that pretend to be air-cooled. If they’re proud of their design, they should flaunt it. But no: they put unnecessary fins on the engine, just to fool you into thinking there’s no water jacket surrounding it. It’s deceptive; just sitting there, that bike is lying to you.

I get a similar feeling about Vista. My first impressions (in print, alas!) were largely favorable. This OS fooled me! Yes… the superficial glitz, the chrome, the few little usability touches… it all convinced me that this OS was not bad.

But Vista isn’t that OS. Use it for a while and the chrome starts to flake off. The Aero interface starts to cloy, to give you a headache. The usability touches turn out to be badly conceived. They rarely help, and more often get in the way.

But that first “out of box” experience fooled me into thinking I might actually like this water-cooled two-wheeled car.

1,001 Things I Hate About Windows Vista #2: The Missed Opportunity

The thing I probably resent most about Windows Vista is that it’s an unimaginably vast missed opportunity. After five years, it essentially fixes nothing that bothered me in Windows XP.

We all have our wish-list. Mine included things like: why the heck don’t Explorer windows actually remember their settings? (There’s some sort of FIFO queue that lets XP remember only about 50 settings; open the 51st window and it’s back to defaults.) Also, why do new Explorer windows open so huge — even if they’re totally empty, or contain one or two tiny files? Why can’t I stop Windows Help from popping up whenever I inadvertently hit F1? Why does Ctrl-Del mean one thing when editing a filename, and something totally different in every other Microsoft app? Why isn’t there a way of saving the positions of desktop icons? Or the sequence of files in an Explorer window? Why don’t computers show up on the network as soon as they boot?

Etc. I won’t itemize further, or I’ll have to change the name of this list. Anyway, it’s all pretty minor stuff.

Minor, maybe… but Vista essentially fixes nothing on my XP wish-list. At first, I expected the new file Explorers would be a big improvement. “Anything would be a huge improvement,” I naively thought. “How hard can this be?” Too hard for the Vista team, I guess. The new Explorers add features I didn’t want, and which don’t really solve my fundamental problems for me. I’m not sure yet how good Vista is at remembering window settings, but it definitely doesn’t remember window positions, and it still insists on opening new Explorers at ludicrous screen-covering size. (Fortunately, Basta Computing’s indispensable ZMover still works in Vista.) Networking is the same deal as in XP, so far as I can tell. And so on.

There’s lots more things that Vista doesn’t do, but I’ll leave those to their own separate entries in this ongoing series.

1,001 Things I Hate About Windows Vista #1: The Name

Actually, I like the name. “Vista.” Beautiful. Euphonious. What I hate is that Windows Vista has a name at all.

Answer me this: how many of you spent the last five years pining away for a new operating system? Okay, put your hand down, you in the back. Now: how many of you have been waiting for an improved version of your old operating system? Hmmm… just as I thought. What most of us really wanted was “Windows XP 2.0″ — not “WholeNewOS 1.0,” with a whole new set of 1.0 teething problems, a whole new set of (1001) annoyances, and a whole new learning curve.

The transition from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was close to ideal: smooth, gentle, logical. Every tweak an obvious improvement, and no changes made for no reason. Of course, earlier transitions were more disruptive: Win9x to WinNT, for example. But there was more that needed fixing back then. We needed to make the leap to a true 32-bit protected-mode OS, and that step was going to be a big one no matter what. (Ask former Mac OS 9 users, who are probably still updating some of their apps for OS X.) But going further back, the shift from Win 3.x to Win98 was again a reasonable one.

Not so with Windows Vista. WinXP is a very good OS, yet Vista changes stuff that didn’t need changing, in drastic ways, and mostly for no good reason. (Or not good enough, anyway.) It’s like Microsoft decided on the Vista name, fell in love with it, then felt it had to create a product that could justify the dramatic new moniker. Almost like the marketing department got to trump the programming department. Could it be…?

1,001 Things I Hate About Windows Vista: Preface

After running Microsoft’s new operating system for a while, I’ve started accumulating a list of annoyances. A very long list. It’s not up to 1,001 items yet, but it’s growing rapidly enough. I’m sure it will get there.

Brief disclaimer: I’ve never been a Windows-basher, nor a Microsoft-basher. I’m a Windows user. Maybe even a Windows fan. And it’s as such that I offer these comments… Call it constructive criticism. Nobody wanted Vista to be the perfect OS more than I did, and nobody hopes that its flaws will be fixed more than I do.

Unfortunately, nobody at Microsoft has so far ever taken any of my suggestions. I once sent them a long list of things that needed doing in Word, about eight or nine years ago, when they actually maintained a “wish list” Web site. Now, as someone who writes for a living, and who writes about computers, and who is a graduate engineer, you might think I might hit upon one or two intelligent thoughts on how to build a word processor. However, the sad fact is that none of my ideas have been adopted so far. Shocking, isn’t it? (See my next list, “10,001 Improvements Needed in Word 2007.”) Still, one lives in hope. Microsoft used to be the company that succeeded by shamelessly sucking up to its customers. Let’s hope that old spirit is still alive somewhere under the corporate veneer.

Obviously, this is a personal list. Some things I hate, others will like. The point isn’t whether everybody likes every feature of Vista, or hates the same ones I do, but whether a large number of features are “hate-able.” It’s not easy to please everyone, but I think it’s possible to please more people more of the time. That’s what you call design. (By the way, if I find as I go along that I’m discovering numerous things I really love about Vista, I’ll be glad to start another list. So far, though, no danger of that.)

So, without further ado, here’s… “1,001 Things I Hate About Windows Vista.”