Submitted by “Back in 2001 Microsoft’s early betas of Windows XP contained a user interface dubbed ‘Watercolor’. But only months before the operating system shipped Microsoft completely replaced it with an entirely different look and feel called ‘Luna’ which became known as ‘Windows XP Style’. That move has created speculation that current Windows Vista look and feel, called Aero glass, would be replaced by a different look and feel later in the beta process. However, this week’s PowerUser.tv podcast has an interview with Microsoft developers who have confirmed that there will be no major change to the look and feel of Windows Vista from what is being shown in build 5270. In other words, Aero-Glass is it.”
I am so not surprised. That is the only way I think they would have been able to keep the launch of the OS on time!
How is that so? Developing a new theme does not hold back the OS. Thousands of themes are available for XP. One can be made in no time. A professional theme takes longer. But the timeframe to put Vista out of the door is more than 5 times enough.
Current theme is butt ugly. It catters to family people that conside stuff as fuzzy dice and wood-like window frames cool.
I think the Aero design is quite allright, quite a step up from the default XP theme. That said, I haven’t tried Vista in real life yet (always a difference between screenshot graphics and how it actually feels when used).
Anyone know if what’s said on the semitransparent unfocused titlebars though? Apple tried that back in OS 10.1 and hey, it didn’t work then – can’t see why it would work now. Looks damn pretty on screenshots, but extremely cluttery when you have 5-6 windows on top of each other.
actually it’s not cluttery at all , the shadows etc even improve the visual , the windows pop up on the screen as they are above the other windows, it’s actually pretty nice and usable.
I tried beta 1 myself
I’m a betatester and all i can say is wow. Microsoft picked itself up. 5270 is a really good build. There are HUNDREDS of new nifty little enhancements and features. You might say some of them are copied from elsewhere but most of them are the results of their hard work. It’s in the right direction – i hope they won’t screw up the whole thing in the end
I know the disadvantages of XP and past windows releases but this UI is nice and very consistent. The blur effect on the glass frame is totally useable. The underlaying windows don’t disturb me – i don’t really recognize them from the corner of my eye. Users may also disable the transparency and/or choose different colors by hue & saturation (like in WMP 10).
Certainly the UI is a matter of taste from a user’s perspective but i think it will convince most people (more ppl than XP).
Mac zealots have to get a life when vista is released because it will be a very good piece of operating system.
Edited 2006-01-09 22:48
Spoken like a true Windows Zealot.
What are you talking about? He was pretty reserved in his comment, and the gist of it was “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
Ugly. The Start button sticks out of the taskbar. The minimize/restore/close buttions on the windows look uneven and misplaced. If you ask me it looks like a bad OSX rip off. If Microsoft is smart they will change the look before it ships.
I’m not sure exactly how it looks like OS X at all, but if it makes you sleep better at night..
Yeah. That was a real informative comment. Did you stay up all night thinking about that one? I said it looked like a bad OSX rip off, meaning that MS made the UI shiny as hell but didn’t take too much time actually making it look nice or usable.
No. Saying something looks like a ripoff means it actually somewhat resembles it, but poorly.
Apple didn’t invent shiny interface buddy.
Two months after Microsoft released Windows Vista, Microsoft has decided to tone-down their “Aero Glass” theme to make it more user friendly. Bill Gates is quoted as saying “A lot of what we were going for with Aero Glass was showing off all the cool things that a third generation display model could do. Things like transparent inactive windows are the simplest thing to achieve in a third generation display model and so we tried to use these things as much as possible. Unfortunately, it turned out to be overkill on the flash and we’ve made it more usable and less of a show-off stunt.”
Of course, users familiar with Apple’s Mac OS X 10.0 will see this as a familiar course of action as Apple did much of the same effects with their original release (to show off the new system’s power) and then toned them down later in response to users complaining about usability. Steve Jobs noted that “while sometimes it’s simple to add the flash, the flash distracts from what’s really important.”
Windows users are eagerly awaiting this update which will not only improve the usability of the system, but even offer a small speed bump since much of the overhead taken by the cool effects will be gone.
…GNOME and KDE artists to make Aero Glass look-n-feel rip-offs before Vista arrives. 🙂
Edited 2006-01-09 21:46
Sure, as soon as X can do pixel shading on windows.
In a lot of the screenshots it looks cluttered. This is partially due to the wallpapers used, those green nature ones, if they used simple backgrounds for screenshots, it would look less cluttered I think. That said, Vista is going to look cluttered no matter what…
However, most UI’s do these days, even OS X (though less (due to no borders around windows (using shadows correctly)).
I’m not a huge fan of Aero (from the screenshots), but like a lot of ill-informed people here, have yet to try it, looking forward to using it for a while and really deciding then.
One day someone will come out with a simple and elegant way of doing UI’s (maybe someone has), but the old Xerox/Mac way of doing things is getting a little long in the tooth imho… If someone already has, let me know. The mockups that Novel were showing off about a month or so ago looked interesting…
By the way, I almost guarantee Leopard will have the glass thing going too (not saying that is a bad thing by the way)…
(you (forgot (one of (your (closing (parentheses))))))
The only desire I have for Aero-Glass is the ability to disable it and use Windows Classic with Classic Start Menu.
Here, here: the first question for any new Redmond UI is How deep did they bury the completely obvious, like setting an environment variable?
How the fsck do I revert to the known evil being the second question.
In Redmond, the ‘ass is half fool.
Emacs!
One day someone will come out with a simple and elegant way of doing UI’s (maybe someone has), but the old Xerox/Mac way of doing things is getting a little long in the tooth imho… If someone already has, let me know.
Ion at http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/ works pretty well for me. Assuming properly-behaving applications and a good set of winprops (basically hints to ion about where to place windows), it’s orders of magnitude more efficient than the standard cluttered-desk paradigm for window management.
The Aero look is ugly! Bleh … these dudes at MS have bad taste.
I have to agree. I dislike things like the little icon on the start button overlapping over the panel. I also don’t like the idea of see through widgets in programs or see through window controls.
But hey, it’s better than that awful blue-green crayola scheme they did for Windows.
I find I mainly dislike the start-menu from the screenshots. I didn’t like the “two columns by default” look in XP either, so for people who feel like me (and use Windows) I hope they’ll still give the option to switch that off.
At least this looks more serious than the blue-green default they used in XP, though like others I don’t really like the start-menu button either. I like that they turned it into an icon, but I’d prefer the bar to be more stream-lined. A clean line rather than one with a bulge on the left side.
Of course I haven’t seen any of this myself (except in screenshots), so I can’t tell how much of this will be adjustable. And since this won’t become the KDE default look any time soon I guess I have no cause to worry about it.
I actually like it, the grey’s and greens look good to me.
For those that don’t like it, I’m sure you will be able to theme Vista up one side and down the other anyway.
I’m looking forward to running Vista and Leopard on a 15″ Apple Powerbook. Hopefully at the same time, ala Vanderpool.
– Kelson
There’ve been themes like this (Crystal) available for KDE for a long time now for those that wanted it.
I actually like the use of black. It looks good in the UI of an operating system. On the surface build 5207 looked good. One, however, can tell that Apple and Microsoft are going after different markets. The system is designed to be a nice clean file cabinet/digital desk by the way it is organized.
The scheme, however, is a little creepy. The Windows with their transparency and color highlights help reduce this, but one gets the sense that Microsoft is producing a product a little too much like IBM. It seems kind of cold. Still, the foundation is much improved.
Definitely their best look since win95, maybe the most noise about a theme color since some other os went brown.
I took build beta 1 for a spin a while back, so I can give a bit of input on how customizeable the UI is.
The actual start button is stuck as a bulge, but the menu can be changed back to “classic” (one column) while still retaining the glass look.
Just as with XP / 2k, you can remove visual effects, such as fading tooltips, transparent title bars, etc.
One of the neatest UI abilities is to change the color, intensity, gamma, and transparency amount of the “glass” components of the UI. It defaults to the black commonly seen in screenshots, but can be put to any color (it’s just a slider), transparency can be removed, etc. Classic style can be restored (the Win 2k and earlier look).
The one thing I noticed was it was a bit heavy on the memory. From a default install, it ran at around ~500mb of RAM with nothing open. A bit sluggish too, but I don’t think the graphic drivers were fully / correctly installed by me.
It may not be worth the 5 year wait, but it’s still worth checking out one way or another.
What an ugly UI!
What were they thinking?!
And, Aero-Glass->Aqua-Crystal
Can’t they find some other names more sounds like their own?
Good. Now where’s the “off” button?
In display properties. Where else would it be?
Of course I know that. I was just joking a little, I wouldn’t want some goofy display engine sucking my system (video card especially) resources best used for things more practical, like Photoshop or a 3D modeling/rendering apps.
All this pretty eyecandy aero thingamajig dont mean diddleysquat to me.Will turn it off like I do in XP.
All this marketing buzz, done for many years by mircosoft about Longhorn development, for what?? For this interface for teenagers….and that has a single aim: hidding the complete ripp off that Microsoft made of os X. Yes i see all the zealots coming and saying thats again another mac troll, but thats a matter of fact.
I mean look at the features of Vista, the windows flip 3D wichh tries to mimic Expose (but wonderfully badly), the photo app that looks like iPhoto, Windows media player that looks like iTunes, their music store Urge and its integration in Win Media is the same as Apple dis with the Itunes Mucis store with Itunes, the gadgets looks similar to Dashborad but takes half of your screen, their calendar app is ripp off of iCal, i mean every idea that you find in Vista is basically taken from OS X and implemented in another way, most often badly.
Look even at some details. Their alt-tab flip effect shows you all thumbnails of all openden window. Look at the right corner of each window, there is a small icon representing the application the window belongs to, ….the same as Apple does for the minimized windows in the dock.
Look at the new Control Panel in Vista. you can search a system setting inside it, who can say here that its not a ripp off of the search feature in the Preferences introduced with Tiger?
And many other things, i am sure that their application for DVD editing ala iDVD will be a ripp off of iDVD.
Now, i would say that its ok to take an idea and propose something better, but thats not even the case for Vista. Much of its features are ripp off of Mac OS X, but poorly designed. I think about the Flip 3D that is just your stacked windows rotated a little bit. I could imagine that you will get the same result by providing a way to scroll over the windows with the mouse in the 2D plane without the 3D effect, thats the same result.
For a compagny with a huge cash, coming up with so desapointing results is chocking. Gates should feel shame to appear at the CES and talking about innovations around Vista, when in reality they just copy what someone does, thats it. This someone could be anyone, now it appears to be Apple in the operating systems.
Those guys at Microsoft are simply hypocrite, they feel that they are protected by a mountain of cash. All the speech of Gates at the CES was a bunch of marketing bull….. and the dema of Vista was not better.
And now we got this Vista interface, great job Bill……
Are you serious?
Hahaahhaha.
Wow, mac zealots are awfully protective.
I admire OSX, but Vista is hardly a ripoff.
At home I use Mac OS X (and KDE at the moment) and at work Windows XP. They are both hogs and you can theme them like crazy. The key issues are resources. They add all this visual crud which takes up CPU/GPU time, memory, etc. and take away from other applications.
I am glad that Apple has toned their GUI down over each release and hope they phase out more of the extra fluff over time and make it simpler, cleaner and smaller.
I can still run OS X on my son’s 600 MHZ G3 iMac (and he really does use it on a daily basis to watch movies, play kids games on the internet, etc). Will XP run on a similar PII?
Not that I didn’t suspect this, but doesn’t this piss anyone else off?
For months and months they said that what we’ve been seeing is just the preliminary UI, and that Beta2 would have the final look, which would blow everyone’s socks off. Every time someone said that the pre-release versions looked hideous, people said that it didn’t matter because all that would change.
In the past I’ve pointed out that it was completely ridiculous to require DX9 support for simple effects like transparency when that could be done on a dirt cheap integrated Intel graphics board. “Just wait”, people said, “the final version will have graphics effects you haven’t even dreamed of and that will make use of DX9 features!”. Bullshit. All bullshit.
It’s not even about the technology anymore, I resent it when a company has the audacity to lie so blatantly to their customers about what features their product will have.
Agreed. Why don’t some tech pundits seem to get tired of this old Microsoft tactic? I remember in 1994, Microsoft was telling everybody that Windows95 wouldn’t run on top of DOS. (They said this so software houses would kill off their DOS development leaving MS-DOS the only DOS in town, as court proceedings with DR-DOS later revealed.)
I remember in 1997, when Bill Gates stated that Windows98 would have a new technology called “chrome”, which would give users a 3-D desktop, tilting windows, transparency, etc. He never actually showed this, of course, and by the time 98 shipped Microsoft had dropped the feature entirely citing “hardware requirements” as the reason.
Hey, lets go back all the way to the beginning, since I seem to remember Microsoft selling (oops, licensing) MS-DOS to IBM, a product which didn’t exist yet, and later went and bought an QDOS from Seattle Computing to fulfill their licensing obligation to IBM. On that single contract, Microsoft became what it is today. They made millions, and did nothing IBM couldn’t have done on their own for a lot less money. If anybody at IBM had any brain at all at the time, they could have bought (not leased) QDOS or something like it themselves and saved they company millions of dollars in cash that just went straight Bill Gates’ and Steve Ballmer’s pockets.
Anyone else notice a pattern of deception and illusion on the part of Microsoft’s head honchos? Anyone notice that their main business model is to buy software, and then licence the software they bought for hundreds and thousands of times more money than they bought it for?
What exactly do we need Microsoft for again? To sell us licenses for software they bought?
I remember in 1997, when Bill Gates stated that Windows98 would have a new technology called “chrome”, which would give users a 3-D desktop, tilting windows, transparency, etc. He never actually showed this, of course, and by the time 98 shipped Microsoft had dropped the feature entirely citing “hardware requirements” as the reason.
Bill Gates did show off that technology. Hardware requirements were one of the reasons it didn’t get released beyond the initial SDK. Feedback from developers about the development model was another reason, and the DOJ case is likely one more reason as it slowed MS’ progress and they had to limit what they pushed until that case was sorted out. Portions of that effort did show up in Windows 2000, however (GDI+ for instance), and the technologies in Windows Vista (XAML, WPF, possibly others), are evolutions of the Chrome technologies and MSR work. The XML-based, declaritave development model of XAML is similar to that of Chromeffects, as is the goal of code reuse for Windows and the web.
Here’s some links that show off some of the demos MS did back then showcasing Chrome/Chromeffects/GDI2k:
http://www.planetrocke.com/portfolio.asp
http://ascii24.com/news/i/net/article/1998/09/07/612498-000.html
This page has screenshots from demos of Chrome and GDI2K:
http://ascii24.com/news/specials/article/2004/11/15/print/652545.ht…
Direct links to the GDI 2K shots:
http://ascii24.com/news/specials/article/2004/11/15/imageview/image…
http://ascii24.com/news/specials/article/2004/11/15/imageview/image…
http://ascii24.com/news/specials/article/2004/11/15/imageview/image…
http://ascii24.com/news/specials/article/2004/11/15/imageview/image…
http://ascii24.com/news/specials/article/2004/11/15/imageview/image…
“For months and months they said that what we’ve been seeing is just the preliminary UI, and that Beta2 would have the final look”
Well, there’s no beta2 yet so you can’t write such statements. Wait a few months (the final beta2 is expected in february) and then we’ll see if they improved the ui. This topic is only about the theme for vista.
BTW there’s already dx9 support in the ui – a lot of “simple effects” use it.
I already have the same look & feel with Linux/KDE… 🙂
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=33604
Edited 2006-01-10 08:14
I don’t take it. The main color is black in vista, but the logo of vista is nice, shiny and colored. If the graphical designers want a uniform look, then I think we should expect small changes with big differences. I think they will drop black and put blue back in.
Truly amazing that with all of its resources this is the best Microsoft can do. Why would anyone “upgrade” to Vista? All they did was change the awful XP UI wiht no underlying chnages to the OS such as the registry and none of the new Longhorn features such as WinFS. No wonder Gartner warned corproations not to go to Vista for at least two years. You have a whole set of new hardware requirments for some transparency effects. Plus it’s STILL a year away from being released.
Truly amazing that with all of its resources this is the best Microsoft can do. Why would anyone “upgrade” to Vista? All they did was change the awful XP UI wiht no underlying chnages to the OS such as the registry and none of the new Longhorn features such as WinFS.
You clearly haven’t read much about Vista. Else you’d know about the enhancements to the kernel, registry, file system, network/audio stack, LUA, the graphics stack (which is far more than a simple UI change), driver model, and WinFX, the API replacement for Win32 that’s built on managed code.
All of the above is still just a partial list, and WinFS is still coming to all Vista users as a free addition after Vista ships (Beta 1 is currently in developers’ hands).
You have a whole set of new hardware requirments for some transparency effects.
The whole desktop is a 3D surface. You see only a glimpse of this with features like Flip3D. Applications can easily make use of this, and MS has already shown several sample applications that do so. The transparancy and other effects use shaders and depend on at least Shader Model 2.0 hardware being present. It isn’t simple transparency. Look at the video Thom released vs. MS content such as the CES keynote video. For Thom, it’s simple transparancy because he’s forcing it on non-SM 2.0 hardware. On SM 2.0+ GPUs, it’s much more.
Beyond this, hardware that uses the new display driver model benefits from the GPU(s) being treated as general processing hardware with their own scheduler, virtual memory, and ability to share resources. The advanced driver model and DX10 go even further down the path to a generalized computation platform using GPUs for acceleration, and making the hardware more efficient, stable, as well as providing new features.
And if you find none of this relevant to how you use the OS, simply don’t use it. The DWM only kicks in when the right hardware/drivers are available. If you don’t want that (supported hardware is as little as $25 at Newegg), you’ll still get a system that’s just as fast if not faster than XP, and has a more efficient UI, better default security, and new included software.
Plus it’s STILL a year away from being released.
Vista is scheduled for release mid to late this year. It is less than a year away, and Beta 2 CTPs will be in most peoples hands within the next couple of months.
Edited 2006-01-10 16:33
The whole desktop is a 3D surface.
So? You’re buying into the hype full scale.
You see only a glimpse of this with features like Flip3D.
Hmm.. So you’re saying they still haven’t found an actual use for the technology.
The transparancy and other effects use shaders and depend on at least Shader Model 2.0 hardware being present. It isn’t simple transparency.
Not “simple transparency”? That doesn’t make any sense. There is no such thing as “advanced transparency”. The silly blur effect doesn’t count.
So? You’re buying into the hype full scale.
No, I’m giving factual information. Sounds like you just don’t want to hear it because maybe it isn’t your primary platform. That doesn’t change the fact that the capability is there and easily accessed.
Hmm.. So you’re saying they still haven’t found an actual use for the technology.
Flip3D is an actual use. Beyond that, I already mentioned they’ve provided sample applications that guide developers in uses for the technology such as information visualization and increasing screen real estate, particularly in data-centric applications. The information is readily available on the net. Go do some research rather than bashing the technology simply out of ignorance.
Not “simple transparency”? That doesn’t make any sense. There is no such thing as “advanced transparency”. The silly blur effect doesn’t count.
That silly blur effect can’t be done with the same efficiency and quality without using shaders. And it’s only one small element of the UI. Commenting without actually knowing what you’re talking about brings no value to the conversation.
Sounds like you just don’t want to hear it because maybe it isn’t your primary platform.
No, Windows is my primary platform at the moment, although I do switch back and forth between it and Linux. I’m saying that the whole interface being a 3D surface isn’t anything very novel anymore or very meaningful to the average user. The single biggest improvement that will be evident to the user is that drawing is more “solid” for lack of a better word. In other words, no more flicker. This is good, but it’s nothing new or even particularly interesting in 2006.
Flip3D is an actual use.
True, but here’s my beef with it. If this technology is so groundbreaking and so much more advanced than what is available on OSX or X11+exentions, then can we please see a single application that demonstrates this?
Transparency, shadows, window effects (waving in the wind, scaling, shaking, distorting), live updating of distorted windows etc etc. All these effects can be done in Vista, but then again, all these effects can also be done in OS X or X11+extensions.
Furthermore, Vista is the only one that requires an advanced GPU to do it. The effects that were implemented on X11 were demoed on an integrated Intel graphics card. If the requirements are so much steeper, then I expect a corresponding increase in “wow factor” for lack of a better phrase.
That silly blur effect can’t be done with the same efficiency and quality without using shaders.
Really? Do you have any evidence, perhaps benchmarks? Perhaps you are correct, in that case, is the performance difference significant? None of these effects come even close to taxing any GPU produced in the past 5 years, so minor efficiency differences will not impact the user.
Of course in the end it all comes down to usefulness. Transparency can be useful to see interface elements below the current window or to indicate focus. A blurred transparency effect immediately removes the first benefit. There’s a reason why most of these flashy effects were toned down in OSX. But that’s a discussion for another thread.
True, but here’s my beef with it. If this technology is so groundbreaking and so much more advanced than what is available on OSX or X11+exentions, then can we please see a single application that demonstrates this?
Transparency, shadows, window effects (waving in the wind, scaling, shaking, distorting), live updating of distorted windows etc etc. All these effects can be done in Vista, but then again, all these effects can also be done in OS X or X11+extensions.
Furthermore, Vista is the only one that requires an advanced GPU to do it.
MacOS X is currently limited in what it can do quickly because it still handles drawing in software. This will be the case until Quartz 2D Extreme is completed. They are also still working on pixel-independent UI as well. Basically they’re limited to effects that deal with the non-client area or the entire window, overlaying effects or mapping windows to a surface. These types of effects benefit from the window managers composition acceleration. Integration of multiple elements in the client-area of an application is limited due to the performance hit you’ll get because such operations are still performed in software. The same generally applies to the X11 extensions.
Really? Do you have any evidence, perhaps benchmarks? Perhaps you are correct, in that case, is the performance difference significant? None of these effects come even close to taxing any GPU produced in the past 5 years, so minor efficiency differences will not impact the user.
The DX9 hardware Vista requires for Glass has been on the market for around 4 years. Intel’s 945/950 integrated graphics platforms also support it. The primary reason for standardizing on DX9 had more to do with quality than performance (though some features only available on DX9 hardware do increase the efficiency of some render operations). Floating-point color support is one example of the big things DX9 hardware brings to the table. In the case of the translucency offered in Glass, FP color reduces the propegation of errors you’d get doing the multiple blending operations required by the Glass. On hardware with a smaller colorspace, the increased error propegation would result in artifacts such as banding, which would not only look bad, but also could decrease readability of the text on the window surface.
As for perf, I don’t have any specific benchmarks for Vista, but as far as a comparison of DX9 GPUs vs previous generation hardware, you should be able to find info on the net showing that DX9 hardware can emulate the fixed-function pipelines of older hardware using shaders, and yield better perf using such emulation than the native hardware. The generalization of GPUs for acting as co-processors for graphics and non-graphics oriented computation is another thing that will get bigger with Vista, particularly in the DX10 timeframe (CTP already available).
Of course in the end it all comes down to usefulness. Transparency can be useful to see interface elements below the current window or to indicate focus. A blurred transparency effect immediately removes the first benefit. There’s a reason why most of these flashy effects were toned down in OSX. But that’s a discussion for another thread.
The effects were toned down in OS X because they hurt readability. Readability is specifically why MS went with an effect that blured the underlying surfaces, and they also added a sort of glow around the window text for this reason. Also, because the translucency is just some shader programs, it’s easily parameterized and exposed in the UI so MS can (and does) allow the user to change the color scheme or the level of translucency as desired. I don’t think MS will allow this, but it’s also possibly that they could allow ISVs such as Stardock to change the shaders used so you can customize the UI with whatever effects you want.
BTW, here’s a couple sample apps that show possible ways of using the 3D capabilities in Vista.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=109413
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=116394
And more on Vistas features here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=14&TagID=9
http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/
http://microsoft.sitestream.com/pdc05/
Edited 2006-01-11 20:22
Alright, you seem to know more about the specifics, so I won’t argue on that point. I’m just approaching this from a practical point of view and can’t see anything compelling. The demo with the medical app was “cool” and flashy, but I don’t see anything all that new about it. Sure the interface looks slick, and has some futuristic sci-fi appeal, but I can guarantee you that no doctor is going to give a rats ass about that. It’s cool for developers, because anything is a step up from MFC, but I dont see the usability or power of the application being any better than one with standard widgets and views. All the animations are fluff. A round window for the ultrasound view? What the hell for? Reminds me of all those dreadful “cd player” applications that looked like stereos.
Avalon is like flash for the desktop. You can build a lot of very nice and very original looking applications that will all have nonstandard controls and drive users up the wall. What about accessibility? Consistancy in UI is a good thing. Allow designers to have free reign and you get the same mess that is a Flash-based webpage.
By the way, I tried the newest vista build today and it’s pretty damn rough. A haphazzard mix of dialogs carried over from XP mixed with the new style, some programs have menus, some do not, some have toolbars, some dont, vista asks me for permission to execute trivial stuff like the task manager or control panel applets, IE7 will only manage to load a page without crashing half of the time, and then screw up the layout. The library feature is completely useless if you have more than about 30 files, and the open/save dialogs have two modes: too simple, and too cluttered.
Those huge tooltips for network and battery status steal the focus and dont return it, user interface elements that look like they can be clicked cannot or vice versa, and things that look like they could be edited often cannot (in windows explorer).
I could go on, those were just the problems in the first hour or so. Oh yeah, and a fresh install is 8GB.