I've been using Windows Vista as my production OS for a few weeks now. There are lots of things I like about it and a few things I don't. I'm still not sure that the benefits will make the migration costs worthwhile for the typical organization, but that's a factor of the high cost of migrating for most organizations and needs more room for discussion than a simple blog post. Look for some complete research on that in the near future.

In this piece, I want to talk about tabs - a couple of types of tabs.

First, ones I like - the tabs that are part of IE7. On Windows XP, I used both IE6 and Firefox. One of the main reasons I used Firefox was because it had tabs (the other reason was its lower susceptibility to malware, something we can't comment on for IE7 yet, though on paper IE7 looks good). IE7 has tabs, which helps me reduce my desktop clutter. Where I used to have 10-20 IE windows open at once, now I can have many fewer by using tabs. One thing I notice about the way the tabs work is that IE7 is relatively intelligent about how it uses them. I generally get two browser windows running pretty quickly - IE7 puts intranet sites in one IE7 window and other sites in another to maintain security. It's after that that I really notice the intelligence. Clicking on a link in an e-mail or document automatically opens a new tab in the appropriate browser window and opens the link I clicked in the tab. That's a lot better than before, where clicking on a link either opened a new browser window or used the last browser window I used, navigating me away from that site without asking me.
Now the tabs I don't like. I keep a lot of windows open at once. Start with 20 or so Outlook windows, 5-10 IM windows, 2-4 IE sessions (reduced due to intelligent tabs), a few Excel, and PPT files and Lotus Notes and I get up to 30-50 windows pretty easily. I use the ALT-TAB key sequence to move between windows. I've been using it since Windows 95, so it's really deeply ingrained habit by now. In every previous version of Windows, pressing ALT-TAB rotated from the most recently used window to the least recently used window (or minimized windows). The order, starting with most recent and moving to less recently used windows is really important to me. Now the order seems to be the most recent few first, then windows seem to "age out" and be put in some odd order grouped by application.

I sort of know how recently I used a pane and when I have to press TAB say, 15 times instead of four because the windows are no longer in the order of how recently I used them in Windows Vista, it's really annoying. Other people I've spoken with have not noticed this. Usually it's because they use the mouse to move between icons on the start bar or they've started using the Flip-3D feature of Vista (Windows-TAB), which seems to keep the panes in the correct order of recent use. I'm not used to Flip-3D yet because there was a performance hesitation under the betas before it presented the first one (that seems to be better on the RTM code - but Flip3D won't work with less-capable graphics adapters). Even Microsoft can't explain why the ALT-TAB order changed and what order it's in.
To me, this is a real pain, very noticeable, and it reduces my productivity. What are your favorite and least favorite features of Vista so far?

Submit a Comment | Permalink

The first 6 windows are ordered in Z-order (just like the old AltTab), the seventh one is the desktop. After that all the windows get ordered alphabetically in executable path. The effect is that the top 6 windows are your recent ones. Beyond that, windows from the same app are bunched together. e.g. All word documents will be together, all outlook windows will be together, etc. On the brighter side, did you know that you can a) use the cursor keys to navigate Alt-Tab and b) use the mouse to select from the Alt-Tab.

Still not convinced...?
Create a DWORD called "AltTabSettings" in \HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer and set it to 1. This will get you back your beloved classic (and super zippy) Windows XP AltTab.

BTW, this is undocumented and unsupported, but it works :)

Happy Alt-Tabbing!!

Any views on when some deep research into migration cost justification will appear?

Michael,
I know what you feel. Some people seem to think that the new Aero UI with TABs is new, I also use Alt + TAB since the time that we had to install Windows 95 before the mouse driver had been recognised. (Who does remember that you can open the Start menu with simply Ctrl + TAB). Well you can open the tabs in IE 7 in reverse order bij simply clicking one extra key: Ctrl + Shift + Tab. Who needs Aero? In 2010 perhaps.

Not sure how pertinent this is to the discuss, but I'm very upset about my Vista experiences. I'm your stereo-typical user with limited but slightly dangerous knoweldge of windows. Our firm had to purchase Vista machines for our office because it seems that was the only thing we could get our hands on, due to the mass preloading of it. Vista has been a nightmare for our firm. It conflicts with everything. It won't talk to our MS SBS2003 effectively (that's costing me a ton in tech support), it won't work with our real estate software (desktop or online), we can't get it to recognize our network printers, it has effectively shut down our ability to RDC or VPN to our servers, and the silly firewall incessant authorizaion notifier thing is enormously annoying. I have been a huge Windows fan for many years, but this stupid software has cost me thousands of dollars in lost time and technology support fees, and they still can't figure it out, just to be brief about the problems. Sorry guys, but this is the biggest setback for our business so far in two years. Vista is very very bad...it doesn't seem that it was ready for the marketplace and small firms like us (40 people) are paying the price for it. It's everyone that I talk to, not just us. If the goal was to confuse and frustrate the user and create more work for IT professionals, then excellent job to Microsoft. We have one Mac in the building and it's the only damn thing that boots up in 10 seconds, talks to the server and has no issues.

Tim Nordberg, you rock.

Thanks to your tip on changing the registry, I now have my precious Alt+Tab back.

I love my standard windows keyboard shortcuts; they're one of the reasons I have preferred Windows to Mac operation systems over the past decade. I've calculated the approximate number of hours each year I save by using shortcuts and it's amazing. A few seconds saved on daily repetitive tasks really adds up.