Windows Vista Beta 1

Overall, Beta 1 is being billed by Microsoft as a plumbing/IT-oriented release, without many of the final end-user features. This story covers new aspects of Windows Vista Beta 1 that are usable, at least partly. But you should know there are several other features described by Microsoft that I haven't found a way to get at. For example, there's a new Startup Repair Tool that sounds like it might be a reworking of the Recovery Console. And apparently, Microsoft is adding diagnostic tools to aid recovery in error situations.

There are also anti-malware features baked into Windows Vista that are based on Microsoft AntiSpyware, as well as other protective mechanisms, that you can't see in Beta 1. For example, during Windows upgrade installations, the Windows setup routine will scan the computer for malware before initiating the installation. But since you can't perform a Windows upgrade installation, there's no way to see the new malware scan. Windows Firewall will finally protect against both outbound and inbound threats in Vista, but no user interface for that protection has been added in Beta 1.

Other invisible-to-Beta 1 improvements include reliability claims, such as detection and warning in advance of pending failures. Microsoft hopes to be able to warn users of a pending hard drive crash about 24 hours in advance to give people a chance to back up their data. The software giant also expects to reduce negative events like application restarts, hangs, crashes, and system reboots; and improve that perennial favorite, performance when starting up, waking from hibernation, and responding to user actions. All these things, and more, will have to wait for examinations of later prerelease versions of Windows Vista.

It should go without saying that, in Beta 1, neither performance nor stability improvements are at all evident. In particular, Vista Beta 1 is less reliable than Windows XP. The areas that I've experienced the most difficulty with are the Windows Explorer and using the Network tool to access other computers on a peer network. Microsoft is still in the early phases of development, though, and this is par for the course with a Beta 1 offering. I'm withholding my assessment of performance and reliability improvements until the late prerelease and shipping versions of the Windows Vista code. So should you.

The names for well-known Windows objects, like My Computer and My Documents, have lost the candy-coated possessive. They're now just Computer and Documents. In Beta 1, I have not found any instance of the word "My" anywhere. It's just gone. And that's the way I like it. But that's just a minor aspect of the changes to the shell "namespace" in Windows Vista; when you dig a little deeper you'll find more profound differences.

The Documents and Settings folder contains a lot less than it used to. It now holds only All Users Application Data, meaning basic application settings that are stored when an app is available to all the users on a given computer — nothing that's been customized by the user.

Where it's really happening now is the new C:Users folder, which houses individual user account data files and user-customized or -created app data. The contents of the new User folder look much more like what you find in XP's Documents and Settings folder under Win 2000 and XP. When you open this folder, you'll see sub-folders for every user account on your system, including Administrator and any other accounts you've created. There's also a new Public folder, the foundation for a replacement of the old Shared Documents folder from XP's My Computer.

As you delve into a specific user account folder, you'll find other variations. At the same level as the Documents folder, you'll find the special folders Pictures, Music, and Videos. (In XP, My Pictures and My Music are found inside My Documents.) There's also a new Downloads folder, as well as folders for AppData, Desktop, and Favorites. Finally, there's the new Virtual Folders folder, which I'll come back to.

Just how all these things will work together in the final version of the product is not 100 percent clear at this point. But I like the general direction Microsoft is moving in, because there's no reason for end-users to interact with global data, like that found in All Users. What's more, this may help application makers do a better job of exposing data that can be customized, while tucking away data that should not be manipulated. The truth is, the current system under XP has evolved several times over the years, and it's a little out of control. Hopefully, this will be a change for the better.

The Windows Search field is found in numerous locations in Windows Vista, including every Explorer window and also in the system tray on the desktop. Full text search — commonly called desktop search — is an integral part of Windows Vista.

And it's not just a pretty interface. Windows Vista has a built-in search service that runs all the time in the background, cataloging all the data on your hard drive and creating an index. Windows XP had a similar service, but it was in most cases turned off by default. It was also both slow and ineffective, and it did not deliver the goods in terms of faster delivery of search results. It was pretty much a failure all around.

The new Windows Search Engine service in Vista is derived in part from MSN Search, and it is fast and smart. It is also turned on by default. The search functionality offers both full-context search and searching by metadata. Metadata are data points collected by application data files. Microsoft Word, for example, collects information such as Title, Subject, Author, Manager, Company, and Keywords. If this data is filled in by the user, then Windows Vista will be able to index it. Microsoft will be smartly sucking up file properties like this, but it is up to application makers to promote this capability by, for example, exposing user-input fields for this type of data in their File > Save As dialogs.

Virtual Folders

Search is also the underpinning of several new user interface structures in Vista, including virtual folders. Simply put, virtual folders do not represent file system directories at all. Instead, think of them as pre-configured searches that run every time you open them. Each virtual folder has a specific set of criteria it looks for, and when you open it, it works in conjunction with the index created by the Windows Search Engine to scour your entire hard disk for all files associated with the keywords behind the virtual folder.

Some actual examples may help get this idea across. Windows Vista Beta 1 comes with a useful set of existing Virtual Folders, including All Music, Albums, All Documents, All Videos, and Authors. When you open the Authors virtual folder, for example, you'll see separate "stacks" (you can think of a stack as a virtual sub-folder) of files that were each created by the same person. So the Authors virtual folder might contain 17 stacks, each of which are made up of documents created by a co-worker, family member, or friend — anyone you might have shared documents or other data files with. For example, the memo your boss wrote last January might be a lot easier to find in the Authors virtual folder than by traditional means. And what better way to collect all the individual music tracks on a CD than by checking the Albums virtual folder?

Even though you might think of them this way at first, virtual folders and the files or stacks of files they contain are not Shortcuts. When you delete a virtual folder, or a stack or file in a virtual folder, you are actually deleting the real object on your hard drive, not a shortcut to that object. So even though virtual folders do not represent data as it is collected and stored on your hard drive, they do contain real data. It's possible to imagine that someday we might become (blissfully?) unaware of how our data is actually stored on our hard drives, and more focused on meaningful associations among our data — and that appears to be one of Microsoft's primary goals for Windows Vista.

Getting Around Virtual Folders

Virtual folders are only partially baked into the user interface of Vista Beta 1. In this early version of Vista, virtual folders are colored light blue, instead of the manila color that designates file system folders. All virtual folders are stored in the main Users folder, in the Virtual Folders directory found in each user account folder.

You can create custom virtual folders by running a search and saving it with the name of your choice. For example, I created a search for my daughter, Emily. Windows Vista found files of all types on my computer containing the word Emily. I saved that as a virtual folder by clicking the Organize button on the search results screen, and choosing Save Search from the drop-down menu.

Another way virtual folders are exposed in Beta 1 is in the new tree area (left pane) of Windows Explorer. Some of the virtual folders that ship with Windows Vista Beta 1 are displayed in that tree, including All Documents, Authors, Rating, Keywords, Recent, and Types. Since the pre-beta builds, the user-interface controls for virtual folders, regular folders, stacks, and the baked-in desktop search functionality throughout Windows Vista have evolved somewhat. However, they're by no means all there yet. For example, the "Lists" feature is missing altogether, and the search functionality doesn't always work as expected.

The visual control surfaces of Windows Vista are all placeholders in Beta 1. That's why I'm not delivering a detailed item-by-every-single-item description and depiction of all the controls, settings, and workings of the user interface in this story. However, there are some important new structures that are well worth a closer look.

One of the best new features is something probably best described as graphical breadcrumbs. On the Web, the term "breadcrumbs" is used to describe a clickable path, often separated by vertical pipes (the | symbol) or greater-than symbols. As you navigate into a Web site, each step along the way is marked with a new pipe-separated level that's hyperlinked to make it easy to back up or change direction. Windows has long needed something like this, and Windows Vista has it.

For example, when you're in Computer (a.k.a. My Computer), and you drill into Local Disk (C:) > Program Files > Internet Explorer, the Address bar displays the breadcrumbs, showing each level, like this:

Computer > Local Disk (C:) > Program Files > Internet Explorer

But that's not the good part. What's cool is that each step along that path is clickable, and when clicked opens a drop-down menu showing all the possible folders (drives and other containers) you can open at that point. That makes it easy to back up, take a different branch, and so forth. You thought what you were looking for was on Drive C: and now you realize it's on Drive D:? No problem — just click the step right before "Local Disk (C:)," usually "Computer," and choose "Local Disk (D:)" from the drop-down menu.

This is a very simple user interface that makes graphical navigation much faster than in previous versions of Windows, which usually defaulted to editing the path statement in the Address bar or opening a new window and starting over.

Navigating Folders And Virtual Folders

There's one last twist to the breadcrumbs functionality: It doesn't just navigate file system folders, it can also chart virtual folders and stacks. So if you open a folder window and then click the light blue All Documents virtual folder in the tree pane, the breadcrumbs show the path through the file system to the virtual folders, and then tunnel right into a given virtual folder and even a stack — neither of which is truly a physical object container.

The mixture of virtual folders and file-system folders can be a little confusing at first. But then, so was the whole idea of Aliases under the Mac and Shortcuts under Windows — or even the program icons under Program Manager in Windows 3.0. Remember that virtual folders and stacks are representational. They show collections of associated files, grouped not by their physical location on the hard drive but by how you think about them.

Explorer windows, including Computer, appear to be the furthest along in terms of the development of their functionality and user interface. This is where it all comes together: desktop search, new scalable icons that help convey what they are or what they contain, virtual folders, stacks, lists, graphical breadcrumbs, and more. In fact, there's so much going on in this heavily upgraded Windows structure that I'm going to stick to providing a glimpse of what's clear now, and hold off on the full explanation of what these new functions can do for you until I see them actually work properly in Beta 2.

About 95 percent of what I wrote about the Start Menu in my coverage of the WinHEC late alpha build of Windows Vista remains true in Beta 1; it just looks a bit different. And it's still nowhere close to being the final look and feel.

This is a good change. It's less confusing and much easier to navigate. (When you actually see it in operation, you'll see what I mean.) A convenient Back button appears at the bottom so you can go back to the main Start Menu.

One hitch in Beta 1: You can't rearrange the order of items on the All Programs menu the way you can in earlier versions of Windows. You can drag-and-drop rearrange items on the main Start Menu, though, so perhaps Microsoft will get to this on the All Programs menu as well.

Application Search

Just below the All Programs button on the main menu is a search field. There's nothing that shows that this is different from other search fields in Windows, but it is different. Its reason for being is to help you rapidly find and launch programs. Loosely speaking, it's a type-ahead program launcher that searches your entire drive for registered applications based on text you type.

In the Beta 1 build, it's a little quirky. For example, type "e" and you don't just get programs that start with the letter E. Instead, you get program names that have the letter E as the first word in any part of their names. So, for example, Windows Event Viewer and SnagIt 7 Editor both show up. Somewhat annoyingly, you have to type "regedt32" to be given the option to run REGEDT32.EXE, or the System Registry Editor.

This functionality seems to be keyed to programs that report formal names. As is, it doesn't make it any easier to launch programs by their file names. I think Microsoft should optimize this feature for power users. Any sense that rank-and-file Windows users are going to use this frequently is, I believe, misplaced. The idea that we might want to find every item with the word "Explorer" in its name because we can't remember if we want Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer is, I think, overthinking the utility of this feature.

Pop-Up Menus

In Beta 1, Microsoft is using a right-arrow user-interface symbol to indicate that there are other things you can do with a given item. Then when you click that arrow, a menu pops up or down showing options. To me, this is a little confusing. Both the Log Off and Shut Down buttons work this way. My chief annoyance with this is that the little arrow requires too much precision to click rapidly. And, in particular, the default Shut Down operation is, well, shutting down. When you want to Restart, you need to click the little arrow and then select Restart from the pop-up menu.

Here's what I think Microsoft needs to do: Settle on one user experience for managing the process of Windows shut-down, log-off, restart, hibernate, and so forth. Windows XP has two completely separate ways of doing this, one aimed at consumers and the other designed for corporations. And that causes problems with applications — especially OEM PC programs — written to this process. It's also confusing to end users. If Microsoft puts some development time into this area, I think it could come up with a single process that works in all settings. Perhaps the controls for things like "never remember passwords" for the corporate logins could be handled by policies in user account settings.

Document Explorer

The last bit of significant change to the Start Menu is the addition of the Document Explorer, which is prominently displayed on the right side of the primary Start Menu. The menu item reads "Documents," but this doesn't link to your C:User{Current User Account}Documents folder as you might expect. It links to the All Documents virtual folder, or preconfigured search of all the documents on your hard drive. The "Pictures" and "Music" menu items below Documents are also links to virtual folders.

Microsoft has hit upon the perfect solution to a long-standing Windows problem that has become more important in recent years because of security issues. While it's a perfect solution in theory, I'm concerned it might fail in the real world.

The Old Way

The problem is this: Most Windows users log into the default user account, Administrator, and never use any other account. The Administrator login has full power to make changes to any part of the file system or operating system. In other words, it's a dangerous account for someone other than you to access your computer with. And it can be a dangerous account for you to use if you're not an experienced Windows user. Younger kids, for example, should never be given Administrator access to a computer. That's asking for trouble.

Worse, since every Windows computer has this default full-privileges user account, and that account name is "Administrator," it's very easy for hackers to access it. They know where to look. On many computers, this user account isn't even password-protected.

But there are solid reasons why this unsafe situation has been the typical condition on literally millions and millions of PCs for years and years. The only other default account type that Microsoft offers, the Limited Account, is so limited that even experienced users find it very difficult to work with. For example, you'll have serious trouble doing things like changing the date and time of day, making changes to your network stack, installing applications, and installing device drivers from a Limited account. What you're supposed to do is log out of the Limited account, log back in with your Administrator account, make those changes for the Limited account, log out of Administrator, and log back in to the Limited account. Even if you know enough to do that, most of us are far too busy having real lives to bother with what is truly a lot of nonsense.

And yet important security issues, especially in recent years, make this about as far away from nonsense as you can get. A whole new way of dealing with this is sorely needed.

The New Way

Microsoft's solution, called User Account Protection (UAP), makes a lot of sense. It's attacking the problem from both sides. On one side, it's expanding the scope of Limited account privileges. For example, locking down the system clock is an important thing to do for security purposes on a Limited account. But there's really nothing wrong with allowing the user to change the time zone of a Limited account. You can't make that change from a Windows XP Limited account, but you'll be able to do that in Vista. So, Microsoft is running through all the privilege restrictions on the Limited account to liberalize aspects of default privileges smartly, when loosening does not pose a security threat.

The other part of the software giant's strategy is to borrow the privileges of your Administrator account by authenticating to it. In a Windows Vista Limited account, it is possible, for instance, to change the system date, month, year, and so forth. The way you do that is by double-clicking the clock in the system tray (or opening the Date and Time Control Panel). A new Unlock button appears on the dialog. When you click that button, you're prompted to enter the name of a user account with administrator privileges and its password. When you clear that hurdle, you'll be given full access to make date and time changes.

Installing Apps

That's all well and good, but the most frustrating scenario occurs when you want to install a new application. Limited accounts do not have the right to install programs. And this is probably the single biggest reason why so many Windows users who have tried Limited accounts in the past have gone back to accounts with Administrator privileges. So you'd think Microsoft would just apply the same logic to the process that they did with the system clock. And they have. But software makers must also join the effort to make this work. They have to make their applications Limited-account-aware and provide the Unlock functionality in their setup routines.

Microsoft is a much better-than-average market leader when it comes to creating structured environments for third-party software and hardware providers, helping them work toward shared goals like this one. And I suspect that most mainstream business applications will support Windows Vista's User Account Protection features in fairly short order. But there are literally thousands and thousands of shareware and freeware apps whose makers will probably never get around to adding this support. Or, at the least, won't do so for years to come. And that means that people trying to use Limited accounts — especially in the early going — may be frustrated enough by the installation hassles that they'll go back to working out of a user account with full-fledged Administrator privileges. And that will defeat the whole purpose.

I can't fault Microsoft's technical strategy in solving this problem. It's spot on. But something has to be done to strongly inspire the majority of software makers to comply — or to make it a moot point whether they comply or not.

Account Setup

There's a small behavior Microsoft has introduced that I like a lot. The first time you create a new user account, Windows Vista insists that the account must have Administrator privileges. After you do that, the default Administrator account disappears from the consumer-oriented Welcome Screen login. This is Microsoft's way of trying to herd users away from using the default Administrator account. It's not serious protection, but getting us all away from using the same "Adminstrator" account with full Admin privileges makes it a little harder for malware programs to script full access to a computer.

In Beta 1, UAP is a feature you turn on or off. (Let's hope that option is preserved in the final version of Windows Vista.) One frustration I had with the feature is that when it's turned on, even accounts with full Administrator privileges are endlessly prompted to enter the login password to make changes to things Administrators normally have direct access to. This may be a bug of some sort. Let's hope so, because that functionality could be enough to cause some people to turn off UAP, or possibly to skip out on moving up to Windows Vista.

The success of Mozilla's Firefox finally spurred Microsoft to add tabbed browsing and basic RSS support to Internet Explorer 7.0, which is included in Windows Vista. As modest as those changes are, they make a big difference to the overall usability of the world's most widely used Web browser — even in the rudimentary form they currently take in Beta 1.

Tabbed Browsing

The tabbed-browsing bar is the single most important feature in IE 7.0. When you launch the browser, it displays one wide browser tab containing your home page, with a small dark gray button to the right of the tab. To add a new tab, you click the gray button, which continues to appear just to the right of the right-most tab. This works well, but isn't obvious to new users. Microsoft will almost certainly build user-interface refinements to this basic functionality. As you add new tab windows, the width of all the tabs compresses, working something like the program buttons on the Windows Taskbar.

Right-clicking the dark gray button has no effect in Beta 1. But you can right-click any tab button or empty space on the tab bar to bring up a context menu displaying the New Tab, Refresh, Refresh All, Close Other Tabs, and Close options. Sorely missing is a simple way to rearrange the tabs or close them without using a context menu. Several Firefox extensions offer functionality that IE7 should adopt, including double-clicking to close tabs, the ability to rearrange tabs by dragging-and-dropping, and the ability to save tab sets and reopen them later.

This version of the browser offers three basic on/off configuration settings, found on the Advanced tab of the Internet Options Control Panel: