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Vista RevisitedThe new version of Microsoft Windows is a lot like the old one. But better.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008, at 5:39 PM ET

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The color scheme may be familiar, but the Windows taskbar—that menu at the bottom of your screen that shows what programs you're running—has received a major facelift. In fact, the redesign here is so fundamental that it could confuse a lot of Windows users and turn them off altogether on the whole OS.

To understand the significance of these changes, recall how the Windows taskbar differs from the corresponding element on the Mac, the dock. First introduced in Windows 95, the taskbar's main function has long been to show you what programs are currently running on your computer. Each on-screen window has a corresponding button in the taskbar, and in Windows the most obvious way to switch to another app—especially one that may be hidden somewhere on the screen—is to click its icon in the taskbar. The taskbar is, for many people, the heart and soul of the OS—the place you look most often to understand what's going on with your machine.

The Mac OS X dock is a more hydra-headed beast, combining many different functions into one interface: As in Windows, the dock puts up an icon for every program you've got open; you can switch among different running apps by clicking on their icons. But the Mac's dock is also a place to launch new applications—that is, some of the icons in the dock represent programs that you can choose to run if you'd like.

I prefer the Windows approach over the Mac's. It's not only simpler to grasp—everything down here is something I've got open—but it's also very useful, a quick way to see what's happening on your computer and to switch between different tasks. Over the years, though, Microsoft has made several changes to the taskbar that make it much more like the Mac's dock. Beginning in Windows XP, several similar taskbar items were grouped into one button; for instance, if you opened up a lot of Firefox windows, Windows would collapse them into a single icon on the taskbar. This makes the taskbar less useful as a window-switching tool—you've got to click on this one icon to see the different Firefox windows you're running. Microsoft also began to incorporate permanent shortcuts into the taskbar, turning it into a place to launch programs, not just switch between them. In Windows 7 the transformation is complete: The Windows taskbar now operates pretty much exactly like the Mac OS' dock.

An icon in the Windows 7 taskbar could represent one of several kinds of items: It could be a shortcut to a program that isn't currently running—if you click it, you'll launch that program. It could be a button representing an already open window—click that, and you'll switch to that window. Or it could represent a group of windows that are open—click on the Word icon, and you'll be able to choose which of several Word documents you'd like to switch to. Both the Mac and Windows use slight graphic clues to highlight these differences, but they're not as obvious as I'd like; it often takes some mousing around to figure out what exactly is being represented by an icon in the taskbar or dock. Still, Microsoft has implemented a few cool features that make this easier than on a Mac. For instance, if you simply move your mouse over a taskbar item, a large, transparent preview of that window appears on the screen. (To see this feature in action, watch this video.) Mac OS X engineers should swipe that feature.

Windows-watchers see the new taskbar as Windows 7's greatest weakness; Paul Thurrot, who writes the SuperSite for Windows, calls it "a whopper of a mistake, and one that will actively harm most Windows users." While I'm no great fan of the new taskbar, I think this is an exaggeration. If the worst that can be said of Windows 7 is that it copies one of the Mac's worst features, that's not so bad. The Mac OS, remember, is the one everyone loves. Borrowing liberally from Apple accounts for much of Windows' past success. If Microsoft is just a bit more diligent in its pilfering, glory will surely return.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

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