Another Windows 8 Pre-Beta Surfaces 534
angry tapir writes "While Microsoft has not announced the release date of its follow-up to Windows 7, an early pre-beta version of Windows 8 (although its official name has not been confirmed) has surfaced on the Internet, the second version to appear within a month. It is the second milestone release that has showed up on the Internet this month. Users of this Windows 8 software have said it features a Ribbon-based user-interface, similar to the one used in recent editions of Microsoft Office. This specific milestone build also has software for a Webcam, a new task manager, a PDF reader and an immersive browser." "Surfacings" like this tell me that Microsoft sees the value in crowdsourced opinion gathering far more than they're sometimes given credit for.
Re:The Ribbon: (Score:2, Informative)
It's not that the ribbon is a new UI to learn. It's that they changed other fundamental things. For instance, a big pet peeve of mine: you used to be able to double-click the axis of a graph to pull up the axis properties dialog; now this doesn't work and you *must* right click and select a menu option (or navigate to the ribbon). Also, the tab stops in the new dialog don't work the way they used to, increasing the number of key-transitions required to change the axis dimensions. This is a real pain for those of us who were forced to use Excel for technical things.