However, reviews that start and end there are vastly incomplete. Why? Most computers that will run Windows 8 will not be tablets. Windows 8 will put Windows 7 into retirement, and soon every non-Mac PC will ship with it. Touch may be the future, but the mouse and keyboard aren't going away anytime soon. How this new OS works with a mouse and keyboard is as important as any other aspect of it.
In short, it's not a great experience. I can say that, missing Start menu aside, the desktop is almost identical to the one in Windows 7. It doesn't progress, but it doesn't regress either. There's not much to say about it.
With the Metro environment, on the other hand, it's painfully obvious that it wasn't designed for the mouse. Microsoft put up a sunny video showing that you can "rediscover your mouse and keyboard", but that's not what you're doing. You're discovering how to make this new thing work with input controls it wasn't really intended to have.
Take the Metro version of IE10:
This is what it looks like when you bring up the address bar/tab bar. How do you do that? By right clicking somewhere on the web page. Don't click on a page element, because you'll get a context menu for that element. You have to find an empty spot and then click. This is annoying.
Once the control bars appear, you see that they're far bigger than they need to be for a mouse. They have to be large, though, in order to function as touch targets. Being large enough to be a touch target is one of the biggest design considerations for Metro and rightfully so. But, it's unnecessary with a mouse.
The address bar at the bottom is particularly annoying. It comes and goes quite often and takes up a large amount of space when it shows up. People need to see the address bar any time they navigate to a new page to make sure they're not going to a scam site, so it's frequent appearances are justified. I'd much rather it work like any mobile device browser, though, where it appears at the top and scrolls away when you scroll down and reappears when you scroll up. The current behavior is too much movement.
The file browser, full control panel, and desktop IE10 are about all you can do on the desktop with a fresh install. Yes, even venerable Solitaire has been Metro-ized, and it hooks into Xbox Live too!
Every single time you launch it, you have to sit through a Solitaire splash screen and an ESRB notice (presumably a requirement for all Xbox Live-enabled games) before getting to play it. Once you get past that stuff, you find a game that doesn't perform well and cannot keep up with quick mouse motions. It's probably an issue with my five-year-old laptop having old graphics hardware, but this machine does meet the recommended requirements. It's also probably an issue with this being pre-release software, but either they need to do a lot more performance optimization or raise the bar the hardware requirements.
Solitaire being a dog performance-wise isn't the only rough edge I have found on this thing. For one thing, Firefox feels faster and snappier than either version of IE10. I'm even using the Aurora channel to make it pre-release apples versus pre-release apples, but Firefox leaves the IE10s in the dust.
I also decided to try out some apps from the Store. Cut the Rope is a popular game on a number of platforms and it's featured right there at the front of the store. I click install and... error. It can't be installed. I try again, and once again, no luck. I have to close and reopen the Store app to get it to install.
OK, fine. I go to the Top Free category and notice a podcast app called SlapDash. I listen to a lot of podcasts, so I download that one. Pull out the sad trombone, because it can't find any feeds the first couple of times I run it. A while later I try it again, and this time it works. I have no idea why or what the difference was. In addition, the built in Metro apps appear in the store and give you the option to install them. Even though they're already installed. Yeah.
The built in Metro apps are OK, but they're very under-featured. I realize that simplicity is a goal, but for instance, the Mail app can't even search a mailbox. The only one that stands out to me is Weather. It too had an issue with downloading things, in its case the conditions for the default location of Seattle. I was able to add my location no problem, but it still had issues getting the Seattle data. It's also not clear how to get rid of Seattle, which would be nice as I don't care about the weather there.
Still though, the layout is gorgeous and it has all the information you could want. The main screen shows the weekly forecast, followed by the hourly forecast, followed by a dozen different maps, finally followed by the historical information for your area. I can say this is the Metro app that works best with the mouse among those I've tried, principally because no clicking is involved. You just scroll from one view to the next.
Other annoyances:
- I keep expecting the Start menu/Metro home screen to appear on my Alt+Tab list. It feels like any other window in the system, so why not? Alas, it does not appear there and probably never will.
- In the Metro environment, you can't see a clock unless you mouse over to the top or bottom right corner of the screen and then move the mouse towards the middle to activate the charms. It should not be that difficult to check the freaking time. Why there isn't a clock on the Start menu, I have no idea. There's plenty of unused screen real estate to fit one in.
- Weather aside, there's nothing about many of Metro apps that's better than using their browser-based counterparts. Maps is not as good as Google or Bing Maps online. Mail is not better than any web-based email. The SkyDrive app isn't better than the SkyDrive web interface, and so on. Well, in some ways they're probably better if you've got a Windows 8 tablet as they're touch-optimized, but that's not what kind of review this is.
Windows 8, by virtue of being Windows, will reach near-ubiquity at some point. However, it makes a very loud and very clear statement: the mouse and keyboard are second-class input methods in the Metro world. That's fine in a vacuum, as touch is likewise inferior in the Desktop world.
The problem is that there is no way to live in just the Desktop world on a traditional PC unless you cover the desktop and taskbar in application shortcuts. At the very least, you'll have to go into the Metro Start menu to launch anything that's not pinned to the taskbar or doesn't have a desktop shortcut.
Windows 8 was designed to combat the iPad, clearly, but it might be the best thing to happen to the Mac since the Windows Vista train wreck. OS X, even in the upcoming Mountain Lion update, is completely mouse-optimized. Only Launchpad feels like something touch-optimized, but it's completely optional. All of the touch enhancements to OS X have been in the way of trackpad gestures. It's getting to the point where it favors the trackpad over the mouse, but you can still get around just fine with a mouse for sure.
The Metro stuff is going to frustrate people who just want to use a mouse and keyboard, and there are plenty of those people. The 100% mouse-centric Mac will beckon from afar, and I'll bet a lot of people make the jump for just that reason.
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