What? Me Windows?
In the interests of being fair, impartial, and both-sides-of-the-coin-y, I decided to post a positive comment about Microsoft, specifically Longhorn. An eweek article made note of a few things that were pretty cool such as:
one of the most interesting aspects of Longhorn is its use of the Windows Future Store, or WinFS, which exists as a layer atop NTFS for enabling SQL-type queries of data on the local file system. This capability is roughly akin to what Be Inc.’s BeOS offered several years ago, and will allow users to perform broad and detailed searches for data on their systems in ways that are not possible in current Windows systems.
Having run BeOS on my spare machine for awhile (it’s a shame it doesn’t exist anymore, it was fun-like for a spare machine), I can say that this was a fairly cool feature, especially for a production machine where you quickly build up tons of files named all kinds of ways. I’m not to fond of the fact that it’s still going to sit on top of [google]NTFS[/google], but that’s not too bad.
Longhorn sports a new look that’s powered by Microsoft’s Avalon, the presentation system that brings hardware-accelerated, vector-based graphics to the standard Windows interface.
This feature is key to having a slick looking, fast rendering GUI. Quartz, which Apple uses, is based on the PDF, a vector file format that gives OS X it’s sharp anti-aliased looks and transparency effects without any slowdown. I had been wondering if Longhorn would have anything similar, and fortunately, it will.
The only point the article brings out that’s negative is that :IE: still doesn’t have tabbed browsing. I’m positive that will change before Longhorn goes final. I mean...not having them would just be plain silly.
Posted Wednesday October 29, 2003 in Around the Internet by Derek Jones
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In case you haven’t seen them, there were some screenshots “leaked” out for Longhorn. It’s kind of hard to tell what some of the stuff is, or at least how exactly it’s working. And, obviously, this is way pre-beta (seeing as how it’s not slated to release until 2006!!
One thing to really note, of course, are the :IE: screenshots. Pop-up blocking, a download manager, and “add-ons” are clearly responses to those features in Mozilla and other modern browsers. Even if (somehow) IE ships without tabbed browsing, then I have no doubt an add-on to accomplish it will be released probably the next day by someone.
By Chris Curtis on October 29, 2003 at 02:02pm link