Microsoft just announced Windows 7, a successor to Windows Vista. It has been about 2 years of unpopular time for Vista and Microsoft is quickly readying its successor to cleanup its tarnished Image.

Windows XP is touted as most successful operating system ever. It has been in use since October 2001 and continues to dominate as the PC Operating System. Microsoft perhaps was a victim of its own success; yes I am talking about Windows Vista.

As a successor to XP, Vista had huge expectations. While it delivered on Security, Refined Interface, Ease of use and Application Compatibility, many users felt the same to be issues with the system, which made it unpopular:

> Security – Annoying User Account control

> Resource Intensive Aeroglass Interface

> Updated Menus – Confusing at times

Apple thrived on this fact with its “I am a Mac” campaign. Result, Vista disaster. While Microsoft is trying hard to revive the image with “I am a PC” campaign, it has quite some ground to cover.

Enter Windows 7. I have just downloaded the 64 Bit Beta and have installed it on my HP Laptop running AMD Turion. For a Beta version, I am pleasantly surprised with the way it has been performing:

Installation time was 20 minutes and was exactly 6 clicks (Thought it restarted couple of times, it did not require my intervention. As soon as the OS loaded, it prompted me with my wireless connection and I quickly configured.

The moment I logged in, it suggested installing an Anti-Virus solution and took me to a recommended page. I have however installed my favourite, Avast. It ran with no issues at all.

Quickly I added my favourite applications; Windows Live Applications, Google Picasa, Skype, Google Talk, Flock and Firefox. All of them functioning very well with no compatibility issues. It also downloaded drivers for my latest nvidia card and gave me a preview of its slicker interface than Aero of Vista.

For the User account control, Microsoft seems to have now incorporated different levels so that you can customize, unlike Vista, which seemed a very nice move.

Another striking feature is the new taskbar, which replaces miniature icons with giant ones. Even the applications current running would be minimized into icons on this task bar.

I strongly recommend you to give it a try; however as this is in beta, please do take full backups of your systems before you install it. If you have a spare laptop or desktop on which you can try it, even better.

You can download a copy of Windows 7 Beta from here.

For now, it looks like Microsoft seems to be very much in control and would take every step to avoid repetition of Vista debacle, and from what I have seen of Windows 7 so far. It looks like they will succeed.

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History

You must have heard about this or read about this. Well it is some word coined by the media to describe the competition between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer in early 2000’s. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 (IE6) is dubbed, final nail in Netscape Navigator’s coffin. After IE6, the scene was pretty much silent with IE6 ruling the roost with over 90% market share (including Macintosh).  Opera had it’s own share and no major competitor to was on the scene for IE6.

Enter Safari (Jan ‘03) and Mozilla Firefox (Nov ‘04). While Safari was primarily targeted at uprooting Microsoft’s hold on Macintosh platform, Firefox was a open source project targeted at improving the web experience for users, an it succeeded big time! It got Microsoft working, which slipped into a slumber on development of a new browser. By the time Microsoft woke up to the new challenge in the browser arena and readied IE7, Firefox already developed a huge following and chipped about 12% of market share, therefore successfully initiating the browser wars yet again.

Today

Today IE is at 72%, Firefox enjoys about 20% of market share, Safari (sneaked into most of Windows systems through Apple software update) is at about 6% and Opera a humble 1%. Read in more detail about the percentage shares at this Wikipedia article.

The browser wars today have reached it’s peak with a new entrant, Google Chrome. Google has launched its new browser built on top of Webkit framework used also by Apple Safari. It is a instant hit with the Google fans and is yet to woo hardcore Firefox fans. Chrome is a little more than browser, it is sort of an Operating system which is optimized for all Google Web Apps, try running any Google applications on it and you will agree.

On a feature to feature basis, IE8 and Chrome almost match each other. Safari and Firefox have almost every feature and just lack the crash control (which they claim they will never require )

Do a quick search with the title of this article and you will have a bunch of articles, giving their own views on what’s better and what’s not. I am not going to go into all those details for you. As I believe you can test for yourself and decide.

For now, I run all of the above and give them their respective share of my CPU time

Happy surfing.

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