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Vista Worse For User Efficiency Than XP
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Feb 27, 2007 01:27 PM
from the two-steps-back dept.
from the two-steps-back dept.
erikvlie writes "Pfeiffer Consulting released a report on User Interface Friction, comparing Windows Vista/Aero with Windows XP and Mac OS X. The report concludes that Vista/Aero is worse in terms of desktop operations, menu latency, and mouse precision than XP — which was and still is said to be a lot worse on those measures than Mac OS X. The report was independently financed. The IT-Enquirer editor has read the report and summarized the most important findings."
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Just in from bash.org (Score:5, Funny)
it is preparing 36 000 "are you sure?" windows
Well, like the song goes.... (Score:5, Funny)
Deleting this file, Cancel or Allow?
35,999 files on the disk
35,999 files on the disk....35,999 files!
Delete this file, Cancel or Allow?
35,998 files on the disk
etc.....
Parent
Re:Well, like the song goes.... (Score:5, Funny)
Delete this file, Cancel or Allow?
Cannot delete file 'File 47'
It is being used by another person or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.
Undoing modifications, 35952 files restored.
Parent
Re:Well, like the song goes.... (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me of the new Mac add [apple.com]. It's pretty funny (like most of them).
"Mac is talking to you, would you like to receive? Cancel or Allow?"
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Re:I agree (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Just in from bash.org (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Just in from bash.org (Score:4, Interesting)
How the hell did that get mod'ed interesting in a day and age when you have powershell on both XP and Vista available for use which is just as robust as bash. Furthermore, there is nothing in Vista you can't script with hooks provided. The only tool you need is powershell. The comment makes no sense whatsoever.
I use powershell to script changes to my Exchange server and I could use it exclusively if I were so inclined but I don't need to do anything to my servers often enough where it would matter.
You're right about one thing though, someone should do a comparison of efficiency in administration using a GUI vs a CLI and compare it across platforms. This is the single biggest leap in Vista that would make it attractive to corporate America. Now everything can be scripted and a group policy can govern anything the machine does. That level of control in quite difficult to attain with OS X as I don't see too many management tools for Apple products. Unix, Linux, and Windows all have very powerful native management tools, hell, the BSDs do too, I can't imagine it would be too difficult to extend them to control the GUI interface on OS X.
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Re:Just in from bash.org (Score:5, Interesting)
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Aero != productivity (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm still of the opinion that vista is a productivity booster only for the RIAA/MPAA and microsoft's stock.
Re:Aero != productivity (Score:4, Interesting)
You are pointing out Vista's flaws. (C)ancel or (A)llow?
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Re:Aero != productivity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Aero != productivity (Score:5, Insightful)
I turned of menu fade in any system I'm on, be it Windows XP, BSD -w- KDE, whatever.
All of them display menus virtually instantly like that. Depending on which (KDE, Gnome, Windows), you start to notice slowdowns at various cuttoffs, KDE and Windows tend to slow down faster with decreased memory than CPU, Gnome with decreased CPU more than memory.
That being said, if Windows has a menu fading effect turned on and OS X does not, then there is a lot of bias right there. Also, if XP's fade is set to a shorter time, that's bias too.
Also, there's system information:
Did they compare systems with identical or close to identical hardware?
Did they compare systems with identical costs?
Ex:
Both systems had e6600 Core 2 Duo CPUs with 2GB of DDR2 800 and a 200GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0GB/s drive,
or
Both systems were $1800 from the leading manufacturer (say Apple and Dell for OS X and Vista/XP respectively)
I guess what I'm getting at is I'd really rather see the methods of the experiment rather than just the conclusions. It's not that I find it all that hard to believe (well, the mouse precision seems a little odd, I've never had an issue with the mouse selecting any pixel except that which I told it to click, even on precision stuff where actual pixel mattered - I can believe the menu performance potentially).
I didn't see an actual link to the report in the article, is it pay to read, or did I just miss it?
Parent
Re:Aero != productivity (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, no.
br> Mechanical aspects are just that - strictly mechanical. An 800dpi mouse with a crummy interface is better than a 300dpi mouse and a good interface and has nothing to do with strict user ability. This testing wasn't about ease of targeting based on mouse mechanics - it was about humans and how they make decisions. What is meant is how long you hunt around with the mouse trying to determine the next event that will serve your interests as defined by the current state of the OS, assuming the OS has accurately understood and reacted to you.
As you work with a new OS, you begin to establish a defined set of basic expectations. These are simultaneously calibrated against how reliable they appear to be to you, the wet ware. At some point, you have been trained by the system enough to move from experimentation and doubt as to what will or won't happen next, to Pavlovian reactions which are subsequently modified only as needed.
The original Mac OS was determined, by the US Govt., to take an average of 17 hours of initial use by an operator before they could be labeled trained and basically productive. In contrast, the Windows OS of that time required no less than 7 days before a hapless user was considered an asset.
Want to test yourself and your present OS? Close your eyes, or change the menus to another language and see if you can still hit the right button with the mouse as you operate the system, opening and saving files, etc. Nothing about shear mechanical accuracy or latency involved. It is just you and how well you know and trust the OS, reflecting how well the system was able to train you back when the two of you first met.
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Re:Aero != productivity (Score:5, Funny)
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You know what else has a "wow" factor? (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft should really try for the good wow, not the bad wow.
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Re:Aero != productivity (Score:5, Insightful)
No offense, but I see a lot more built-in bias in automatically discounting any article that says you can be productive on a Mac.
Anybody worth their salt will agree that the pretty widgets, animations, etc. on OS X are nothing but eye candy. But there are plenty of solid arguments for why OS X's interface still does a better job of facilitating productivity. Here are a few that come to mind. (Note that all of these points are orthogonal to cosmetic issues such as the particular bitmap that is used to draw a button.)
The standard Mac OS widgets offer a wider range of functionality than most equivalent Windows widgets. I find that I'm much more likely to feel the need to develop custom interface elements on Windows in order to get the behavior I need for exactly this reason. This leads to less consistency among applications, since different people tend to come up with different solutions to the same problem. Cocoa has done a much better job of cutting this off at the pass. A strong example is tables and tree views on Mac OS versus Windows.
OS X's interface doesn't condescend to the user as much or demand as much attention. There's also a much stronger culture of consistency for dialog messages. When using Windows, I spend a lot more time dismissing unnecessary dialogs and trying to figure out whether to click "yes" or "no" on a confusingly-worded confirmation dialog. (Like I said, this is largely cultural, but I put a lot of blame on Microsoft for this since they set an exceedingly bad example in their own OS - it's not uncommon for me to have to read a warning from the OS itself two or three times to figure out exactly what Windows is trying to say.)
OS X's interface is much more stable. For example, the sidebar in the Finder is static. The sidebar in the Explorer is constantly rearranging itself, adding and deleting items, etc. based on what folder or whatever-the-hell it is (control panel, network places) I'm looking at. It even changes when I select items. This leads to a lot of time spent scratching one's head trying to figure out, say, where the "Create New Folder" sidebar item went, or wondering why the Desktop link went away.
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Re:Aero != productivity (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Aero != productivity (Score:5, Interesting)
I've switched to Mac almost a month ago. I would never, ever, return to Windows. I don't care about the UI (though it's elegant and efficient). The selling point to me is having a nice bash prompt right in front of me, and having good hardware support (I don't care it's "closed" hardware).
I turn on my Macbook and voila! Skype is ready for me. I can video chat with my collegues while at the same enjoying the bsd heritage.
To me Mac OS X is like Windows XP with cygwin tighly integrated minus DLL hell, registry hell and all that crap.
Intel Macs are the best thing ever invented!
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On What Hardware? (Score:4, Insightful)
All of the OSX machines I have access to seem more sluggish and less responsive than my 3 year old PC running XP.
Without more details, this "it-enquirer" is no better than the print Enquirer in the checkout line.
Re:On What Hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me just jump in here. I'm using OSX 10.3 so it's not the most recent release, but I'm also running it on a Dual G5 2.0GHz with 2 GB RAM, which is a pretty fast machine by any standard. OSX is an absolute dog compared to XP on a Core Duo 2.16GHz with 2 GB RAM. Granted, that is a slightly faster machine for most operations, but they are definitely in the same ballpark.
In addition, the XP system (which I am using to write this comment) is way loaded up with crap. I have about 12 icons in my little system tray, for example. The OSX machine is running, well, OSX. I don't have any additional cheese running to keep it going. But then, I don't use it as my desktop system. It is on my desk solely as a graphic arts workstation. I would have THAT software on the PC as well, except the former graphic artist was Mac-only (too afraid of technology to learn Windows) so I have the mac.
The Macintosh has provided me with little but frustration. The system locks up due to application errors more than XP does. I'm running mostly Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Photoshop has been pretty reliable, but the other two applications both manage to lock the machine up to the point where a cold boot is necessary on a semi-regular basis based on how much I am using the system.
Besides the lack of stability, there are also issues with inconsistency. I won't belabor this too much because I've gone over it frequently in the past, but there are no less than three visual styles used (Mail, iTunes, and everything else) and even menus are inconsistent. In some cases if you click a submenu in a context menu, it opens the submenu. In some cases you must hover to open it, because clicking will actually close the menu. What gives?
If you truly believe that OSX will make you more productive, then you are simply a fool, with one exception; if you want to use Apple's bundled applications. Unfortunately they are unintuitive as all hell. Apple is the only company that makes it harder to burn a DVD that just jumps in and plays than to make a DVD with animated menus. But if they do what you want, and you take the time to learn their many idiosyncrasies, it is definitely the cheapest way to get a production studio in a box.
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Re:On What Hardware? (Score:4, Informative)
Almost always, when people complain about bluescreens in Windows or lockups in OS X, it's bad hardware from my experience. Nearly 100% of the time.
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Re:On What Hardware? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you truly believe that OSX will make you more productive, then you are simply a fool
Fool here.
First of all, if Illustrator and InDesign are taking down your whole system, something is wrong with your configuration, your OS installation, or your hardware (RAM?). Illustrator is not the most stable app (although it's not that stable on Windows either) and I expect it to crash regularly, and once in a while InDesign freaks out, but I don't think either one has ever taken down my whole OS. One place to start: if you have the misfortune of having Adobe Version Cue installed, delete everything associated with it.
While PowerPC OS X is somewhat laggier than Intel OS X (which compares favorably to XP on similar hardware), I don't find the difference dramatic, and I don't see any usability problem on my PowerPC system. It's a 1.8GHz dual G5 (3GB RAM), so my experience should be nearly identical to yours, although Tiger is more responsive than Panther in most situations.
With that out of the way, I'll tell you exactly why OS X makes me more productive (and why this summer I'll pay through the nose for a Mac Pro, whose 4 cores and ECC RAM I really don't need, rather than buying a cheaper Conroe-based commodity tower). This is personal to me. YMMV. But judge for yourself whether I'm really a "fool."
1. Terminal. OS X is the only OS that can run Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, and a full bash implementation natively and side-by-side. This is a godsend for those of us who really need to straddle both the business-computing and UNIX worlds.
2. Integrated color management. The OS's color management, while not perfect, is good enough to ensure relatively close color matching between different systems and between screen and print output, no matter what app I'm using. XP and all Linux distros I've used are a disaster in this regard. I don't know yet about WCM (the system in Vista).
3. Expose. I'm a very visual user and text-based taskbar buttons don't communicate the nature of open windows to me nearly as well as graphical previews.
4. Mail. I've never gotten along with with Outlook or any of its numerous commercial and OSS copycats because, dammit, I really want to have all messages in my 4 IMAP inboxes displayed in the same list. Mail is the *only* mail client I've ever used that will do this. (And, no, I don't want to forward all the messages to one inbox. There's a reason I have 4 of them.)
5. Logic Pro. This won't apply to you if you're not a musician. But if you are, it's a fearsomely kick-ass mega-tool (sequencer + synthesizer + lots more) and only available for OS X.
6. OS X software development culture. OSS users are always amazed that they have to pay for so many Mac apps. But the shareware culture promotes developer accountability. Independent OS X software, by and large, is an order of magnitude more professional and useful than such software on either Windows or Linux. OS X's unique development frameworks also help with this by allowing developers to concentrate on usability and features rather than basic nuts and bolts.
7. Easily comprehensible directory structure. A non-n00b Windows or Linux user could start playing with the Finder and locate *anything* important to operation of the graphical side of an OS X system within a few minutes. This makes troubleshooting a simpler and faster process, especially when compared to Windows, where neither file nor folder names are remotely comprehensible.
8. Security (yes, this is a productivity booster). No UAC; the machine rarely asks for admin rights, and when it does, you need to give a password. No time fighting malware of any sort. No instability or slowdowns from malware.
9. OS X text rendering. Compared with other OS's, it's magic. Preserves both character shapes and legibility without any visible compromise. Not only does the increased legibility improve productivity, but it also is a big part of the reason people find OS X systems so visually striking.
If I thought about it longer I could probably figure out a few more -- but I've got work to do... productively.
Parent
It may also have something to do with..... (Score:5, Funny)
Original report unavailable (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Original report unavailable (Score:4, Informative)
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Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where? I don't see the in the article. All I see is that Windows Vista (which I won't ever be using unless they make me at work) sucks compared to XP SP2 and OS X. I don't see why or how they came to those conclusions.
Well (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
An OS should be first and foremost both secure and fast. It should have a very small footprint and...
[...]
It should but does one modern OS have this?
OpenBSD [openbsd.org]
Parent
Speaking as a certified Apple fanboy... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, speaking as someone who personally perceives and is annoyed by logy, sticky, frictionlike behavior in Windows' UI... how the heck can you take an article seriously when it claims minuscule differences ("Windows XP scored 0.40 and Vista/Aero 0.52") in undefined metrics that are undoubtedly influenced by the hardware configuration?
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Vista on a PC with 1 Gig of RAM and an ordinary video card has higher "friction" than Mac OS X... isn't it possible that it would outperform a Mac if you gave it the spiffiest video card and 4 gig? Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Vista "needs" more powerful hardware and that in a year or so, a cheap PC with Vista will have it and perform with less friction than a comparably cheap Mac? If this were true, one could justifiably criticize Microsoft for high cost of ownership, software bloat, and selling wine before its time... but it would only be a rather qualified knock on Vista.
Vista-bashing is reaching ridiculous levels (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize Slashdot will leave no stone unturned when it comes to slagging Windows, but isn't this getting just a bit carried away? There are plenty of things to criticize about Vista - substantial things - if one is so inclined. Look at the totally brain-dead backup and defrag utilities, for example; both are a major step back from their equivalents in XP. But if you really think it's a horrible OS for the reasons cited in this article, you're venturing into Ted Kaczynski-like levels of MS hatred.
Re:Vista-bashing is reaching ridiculous levels (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's a horrible OS for the reasons you state. It fails to provide any advancement in this particular area. It's a debunking of Microsoft's lie that Vista is more responsive. Why are you opposed to that?
Parent
Re:Vista-bashing is reaching ridiculous levels (Score:4, Informative)
Vista's I/O subsystem can keep media streaming off the disk even while you are doing tasks like defragging. Vista's malloc is dramatically better (40%+ in my informal benchmarks). Vista's I/O operations can be canceled, so applications don't mysteriously become zombies because of I/O blocking. Vista's disk caching is significantly improved.
You can't expect to run Vista on a 512MB system and get XP-like performance. But if you have 1GB or more, Vista is often actually much faster than XP.
No, Vista can't make your virus scanner scan any faster. It's not going to make your XVID encoder encode faster. But, let's be honest - no OS can do that. It can, however, make launching applications, allocating memory, and disk I/O much more responsive. Which is exactly what it does.
But, hey, you don't actually need to use Vista to decide that it's "terrible".
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This is quite measurable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Take, for example, the way menus appear. This affects a lot more than just the OS, since many apps use the same interface widgets. If a menu takes 1/10th of a second to appear, then you could be wasting hours of time over the course of a week or month sitting there waiting for a window to load. Having them appear almost instantly would save that time.
The same goes for positioning the menu bars for an application at the top of the window rather than the top of the screen. On the Mac, the menu bar is essentially infinite in size. You don't have to worry about overshooting it vertically. On Windows, the menu bar is only about 50 pixels high, meaning that every time you overshoot it, it's another 1/10th of a second in lost productivity.
Re:This is quite measurable. (Score:4, Insightful)
On Windows, the menu is attached directly to the window for which it has meaning. On the mac, the menu bar is way away at the top of the display where I have to move the mouse further to get to it.
Most of the stylistic decisions between Windows and MacOS can trivially be argued either way.
I have some anti-mac ones for you though; unless you're using the classic theme, the lower-left (or upper-left, depending on taskbar position) corner is an active area of the start menu button. The upper-left corner of the menu bar is NOT an active location to click on the apple menu. The Start Menu's major components are always in the same locations; the recent programs list is always so many entries long, the list of programs to run is so many entries long, etc. The Dock resizes and warps around so that you cannot utilize muscle memory to click on dock items. Icons do not appear under anchored taskbars on Windows, but they DO appear beneath the dock. Windows will always leave my drive shortcuts in the same order on my desktop, and even in the same location if I don't use auto-arrange. On the mac, my "Macintosh HD" icon appears in a new location on my desktop on every boot.
Apple made many very poor interface decisions in OSX. OS9 was actually superior in most regards, but it wasn't as pretty. The Dock is gorgeous, so it is permitted to continue to suck.
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Re:This is quite measurable. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:This is quite measurable. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, selecting the menu bar is easier on a Mac. That I can't argue at all. But selecting the individual menu items is still just as difficult, which you're doing at least once anyway - you gain, at most, 50% speed, assuming that selecting the menu bar is instant (which it isn't.) And if you're going through cascading menus, or searching menus for options, that gain decreases to zero very quickly.
Personally I very rarely use menus for anything - ctrl-s to save, ctrl-f to find, and once in a while I go and choose the "replace" option. But on Windows, the menu is part of the window and is less visually distracting when I change windows (since all the redrawing is localized to one square chunk), whereas on OSX I feel like part of the system interface is changing whenever I swap applications. It's more context that I have to keep track of.
Of course, some of that is doubtless just due to the fact that I'm used to Windows. But the whole "infinite size menu bar == good" thing seems like a bit of a red herring - how much does it honestly generally matter?
Hell, I just noticed for the first time that I forgot to turn menu fading off when I installed this OS a year ago. You can see how often I use menus.
Parent
I'll tell you one way its worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'll tell you one way its worse (Score:4, Interesting)
Well don't blame me. I went right out last week and bought a brand new AcerPower 1000 -- with XP. Figured it might be my last chance to avoid Vista. So there you have it. Solid evidence that Vista is GOOD for hardware and software sales.
Parent
Speaking of "Eye Candy" GUIs (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a very slick looking desktop...won't be upgrading to Vista here
Exposé vs Flip 3D (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't speak about the entire UI, but there has been one big disappointment in my limited experience with Vista.
Ever since Apple added Exposé to OS X, I've been dependent on it. It's amazing how useful it is and how much I rely on it every time I use a computer.
Every time I have to use an XP machine, I find myself trying to go to the corner to show all windows for an application, or for all applications, or to show the desktop.
For that reason, I was very excited when I first heard about Flip 3D - and I thought the 3D effect was a cool addition to already impressive feature.
Unfortunately, Flip 3D almost completely missed the point.
With Exposé, you can see every non-hidden open window at once. Even though they may be thumbnail sized, I can go through more than a hundred windows at a time at a glance. If I need more detail, I can just look at all of the windows for a specific application.
It's not perfect. There are a few small things I'd like to see fixed about it (like clustering related windows together and doing a better job at keeping a given window in the same region in the Exposé view). Still, it almost completely eliminates the need for multiple desktops and vastly improves my ability to find a specific window.
Flip 3D looks cool. It shrinks all the windows to a reasonable size and layers them in a stack. Unfortunately, layering them in a stack means that you can't see everything in a given window at a glance without bring the focus to it. As far as I know, you also can't look at all of the windows for a given application, rather than all of the windows.
It's just sad.
Somehow, Microsoft managed to copy and improve upon the least useful bits of Exposé while losing almost everything that actually makes Exposé useful.
Given that one gaffe, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the same philosophy permeates Aero through and through.
Re:Exposé vs Flip 3D (Score:4, Informative)
To switch between windows in an application on OS X: Cmd-~
Frankly, I'm glad that they made the distinction between an application and a window, unlike the Windows world. It makes a lot more sense, IMO.
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Vista *is* slow! (Score:5, Funny)
Now I've missed my chance at first post.
Windows 95 = Mac 88 (Score:4, Insightful)
Reminds me of a very "snarky" Mac Ad (Score:4, Interesting)
C:\ONGRATS.W95!
Poking fun at the fact the W95 can now support long file names.
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WinVista is like MacOS on un-steroids (Score:4, Insightful)
At twice the price.
Look, I've owned every Microsoft OS since DOS (think it was 1.x, it was back when I used CP/M and dBase in the Army), but my WinXP laptop is the last "upgrade" I'm ever getting from them. It's either Linux/BSD or MacOS after this, most likely a nice Ubuntu Linux burn from the UW servers and I'll run Open Office (which is what I have on my WinXP laptop).
Wow, this is news.... (Score:5, Informative)
#1) What drivers were used? The optimized ones from NVidia or ATI? Vista has a new Video subsystem with a new driver model, and NVidia and ATI have had to write their drivers from scratch, something that maturity of the XP and other OS drivers just don't have.
#2) Was Aero left on to get the speed improvements? Turning off Aero reduces Vista video performance to XP levels, and turns off many of the accelerated features.
#3) Usability is addressed, but based on what grounds? MS spends millions on usability testing, are we all to be so stupid to conclude that their research in this area is not somewhat valid? Are they taking new users, old file manager type users, Mac users, or what? Facts please.
#4) File copy performance? Again based on what circumstances? Our internal tests show Vista can shove mass amounts of files in many settings several times faster than XP, also without exhausting the system RAM or cache as XP and prior NT bases would. I would like to see how these numbers were obtained.
#5) Menu lag? Again, was Aero turned off, how could they be showing numbers that are in direct contrast to our testing? If Aero is enabled, the UI is not only more responsive, but things like Menus and Windows opening are significantly faster than XP and especially OSX.
#6) Mouse precision? This has to be a joke right? The Windows Input model allows for extremely high resolution devices, and is SOLELY based on the input device used. If you pick up a high resolution mouse that obtains 10x the precision that a low end mouse provides in Vista it is very measurable and based upon the device. If you select another input device like a Wacom Tablet, your input resolution can be adjusted based on the device to scale in factors to several 1000 times the variances they use as examples in the article.
This can easily be demonstrated by a simple example, Ink Input in Vista is extremely high resolution, and captures at an extremely high rate.
Are they using a generic mouse and just hooking it up to the systems to get these numbers?
The mouse precision is the biggest joke of the article...
In the interest of balance... (Score:4, Insightful)
Bruce Tognazzini [asktog.com] has long taken Microsoft to task for their methodology. Tog, who used to work for Apple, believed in using real, objective metrics -- video of users, using stopwatches to measure time intervals, etc. Microsoft relies more heavily on questionnaires and other subjective criteria. In other words, to contrast the two approaches, Apple's approach is that the stopwatch never lies; Microsoft's approach emphasizes what users think makes them fast or more productive, rather than what actually makes the users faster or more productive.
But really, this all boils down to the logical fallacy of assuming that just because a corporation spends a lot of money on something, they spent their money well (instead of, say, spending the money as a smoke-screen to appear that they've done their homework).
The points about menu speed and mouse precision are actually valid ones, though the article probably doesn't explain these issues as well as it should. The mouse precision issue isn't so much a product of the mouse's resolution, but rather, the way in which Microsoft handles things like cascading/hierarchical menus, icon hit zones, and the like. Tog wrote an excellent article about Fitts' Law [asktog.com] which gets mentioned every so often, and it's still a good article which really reams Microsoft on a number of points. Pay attention to Question 6 and its answer, for example; this directly bears on menu performance and indirectly on how the mouse is used by typical users.
For those too lazy to follow the link...
To be fair, Tog also takes Apple to task, especially since Apple broke some of its own UI guidelines in OS X.
All that said, my personal experience with Windows 2000, Windows XP, and the Vista previews I've seen seems to indicate a general negative trend with UI responsiveness. Menu rendering lag is especially bad in XP, though I will concede that some of the problem may be due to the insane system load imposed by my (corporate mandated) anti-virus software.
Of course, since you're a MS partisan, you'll deny everything I've just said, but I figured I'd inject something here just to try and add a little balance.
Closing note: Since TFA is lean on details, I actually followed the link in TFA to the source material [pfeifferreport.com] only to find out that it's strictly for-pay. (You can download a PDF of the table of contents for free, but that's not very useful.) So I can understand why you'd find the article to be "a very subjective review with no hard facts." It's not even that -- it's an executive summary of someone else's work. I'm simply not willing to fork over the money to read someone else's analysis.
Parent
Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
One would hope things like this would get better with time not worse. Obviously a vain hope.
Re:I keep my XP UI looking like Win2K (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently downloaded Media Player 11, which shows off a bit of the Vista/Aero interface. Specifically, the minimize/maximize/close buttons in the upper left corner are done Vista-style. What I've noticed through use is that even though these buttons are physically bigger, they very frequently don't recognize my clicks, requiring me to go back and click it again, sometimes 3 or more times. Also, when I hit Alt, F, X (the sequence to exit using the menus in Media Player 10) about 4 times out of 5 the menu refuses to respond to my keystrokes, requiring me to stop, find the mouse, and click the appropriate action.
Obviously, because this is running on XP, I can't make claims as to the overall usability of Vista. However, if my experience is any indication of the way Vista behaves, I'm not suprised that such an article has been written, and I'd expect many more complaints as time goes on.
Parent
I bet Vista IF would be like this... (Score:4, Funny)
[ Cancel ] or [ Allow ]
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