There is much talk on the Internet about Windows 7. Most of the reviews are highly positive and there are many that proclaim that Windows 7 will save the world from the dreaded Vista. However there are few that actually saw the truth. And the truth is that internally Windows 7 is just Vista. What is more interesting is that with the current beta it is no different than Vista on the outside. This just shows that tech reviewers are morons. The same people that wrote gigabytes of text to prove that Vista is bad are now doing the same to prove that Vista (renamed to Windows 7) is really good. Wait! I predicted it all. However there was something much more interesting in Windows 7 that no one was mentioning until now.

   The most interesting thing about the new Vista is the new taskbar. It was unveiled on the PDC but somehow nobody paid attention. This and this were the first announcements of the new taskbar. The new taskbar combines the quick launch and the actual buttons for the running windows in a single icon with no text. Knowing that they will be accused of copying Mac OS and even Linux the first video starts with a history lesson. It turns out that Windows 1.0 had pretty much the same taskbar - icons with no text that can be used for launching and switching applications. History repeats itself I guess.

   It seems that Microsoft have launched a campaign to make the new taskbar more popular. There are several videos on Channel 9 about it.

Windows 7 New Taskbar - An Overview
Designing the Windows 7 Taskbar
Jump into the Windows 7 Taskbar - Jump Lists
Windows 7 Taskbar - Behind the Scenes
Introducing Windows 7 on Channel 9

   I personally believe that the new taskbar is quite promising but knowing how stupid and resistant to change users are I am not sure about its success. In one of the videos there is a suggestion that there will be no way to switch to the old UI which would be a bold but risky move from Microsoft. I personally doubt that they will do that in the end although I hope they will because users are stupid and should not be given a choice.

   Oh, before anyone mentions it Microsoft never promised that the kernel would be 25MB and MinWin is just an abstraction layer in their source code. It is the minimum that can boot (i.e. can be tested in isolation) and there are no calls from MinWin to upper layers of the kernel. MinWin is in Windows 7 but there is no way to use it without the rest of Windows. Do not look for changes to the core OS because believe it or not the real core changes were made in Vista.

   Vista drivers work in Windows 7 which again proves that it is just Vista and the reported stability is simply manifestation of the fact that Vista has matured or what is more important the drivers have matured. All you people who decided to skip Vista are you gonna wait for Windows 8 now?

Update 13.01.2009:
Here is a review that agrees completely with what I have written:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/windows-7-beta.ars/1

Notice that the article was published two days after mine :)