Comment by EvanAnderson
2 days ago
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