Comment by FirmwareBurner
8 hours ago
>Vista was an enhancement of XP.
It really wasn't. You can say XP was an enhancement of 2000, but Vista was it's own thing, they reworked a lot of the NT Kernel and moved stuff like audio and video drivers from kernel space to user space, which brough increased security and stability, but broke compatibility on hardware that didn't bring updated drivers which pissed off a lot of early adopters of vista.
Vista was, arguably, the unofficial beta for Windows 7. Just about everything they tried and failed to execute properly in Vista worked well in 7. (Similar story for 8 vs 8.1-- or more appropriately Server 2012 vs. 2012 R2.)
I’d already switched away, but 7 seemed like the peak in an absolute sense. XP might have been the biggest relative improvement or the best normalized to the competition, but Windows 7 was the last version before development started going backwards.
I actually preferred Vista - there were a bunch of things I thought 7 made worse:
- in explorer, Vista could show column headers in all views (not just details) making it easy to sort/group
- you could use the headers to set grouping
- grouping still showed all the files
- the left tree became buggy in Windows 7, it doesn't always scroll to the current folder (I think it's broken to this day)
- the "quick access" shortcuts in explorer (the top list) was its own section (so you could always click it) -- in 7 and later it is part of the tree so you have to scroll back up to use it
- dragging files into a folder in 7+ instantly sorts them in the view, rather than keeping them together until hitting F5
- windows media player got rid of "find in library", "recently added" playlist, "play all", the taskbar miniplayer
- Vista had peak taskbar tray. instead of the current all-or-nothing overflow thing, overflow icons would automatically show themselves and then hide again
- can't run Explorer as administrator anymore to temporarily access protected files
- movie maker gone, dvd maker gone, sidebar gone
Funny thing is that NT originally had video drivers in user space exactly for security/stability reasons, but moved it into kernel space with NT4 for performance reasons.