Hands on with Windows 8 Release Preview (with video)

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Late yesterday, Microsoft released the Windows 8 Release Preview, the new Release Candidate. Its headline features are improved multi-monitor support, IE10 with built-in Flash (even in Metro), and a handful of new stock Metro apps (Travel, Sport, News).

For a quick run through of the Release Preview, watch the hairy Brit in video below — then continue reading for some detailed screenshots and further impressions.

If you’ve used the Windows Vista, 7, or 8 Consumer Preview for any length of time, the most obvious change in the Release Preview is the flatter, simpler Desktop/Explorer UI. Small hints of Aero are still present (translucent menu bars), but for the most part everything is flat and square. Because almost every Windows Desktop app uses Microsoft’s interface libraries, these flatter UI elements follow you everywhere, from the square Ribbon tabs in Explorer, to the flat scroll bars and buttons (OK, Next, Cancel, etc). There are a bunch of screenshots that show off the new UI at the bottom of this story.

WIndows 8 flat UI, meet Firefox rounded UI

In some places this can cause some odd conflicts: Firefox, for example, has Windows 8′s flat scroll bar, and the Options pane is full of square buttons, but there’s also Mozilla’s rounded tabs, buttons, and address bar (pictured right). Back during Windows XP and Vista, many software companies followed Microsoft’s lead and outed programs with obnoxiously shiny and curvaceous interfaces — it will be interesting to see if these companies now embrace Microsoft’s new Metro-inspired minimalist design paradigm.

Moving along, the new every-corner-is-a-hot-corner is a very welcome addition, as are the “hard” corners that stop your mouse from slipping onto another display when you’re trying to hit one of the four corners. Initially I thought that being able to open the Start Screen from any monitor would be a good thing, but in practice it’s quite confusing. Basically, the Start Screen appears on the monitor you clicked in bottom left hot corner — but then Windows remembers your preference. So, if you then hit the Windows key on your keyboard, the Start Screen pops up on the last monitor that displayed it.

Trying to remember which monitor last showed the Start Screen is tiring — it would be nice if there was an option to force the Start Screen to always open on the same monitor, irrespective of which hot corner you use. This problem is exacerbated by the Alt-Tab switcher, which always appears on the primary monitor. If you watch my head in the video, you can see it’s constantly moving from left to right, trying to track where the Alt-Tab switcher and Start Screen will appear — tiring.

Windows 8 Start Screen and Alt Tab on separate monitors

Tiles all over the place -- where do I look?!

Internet Explorer 10

Visually, IE10 Preview 6 (the build in Windows 8 Release Preview) is identical to the last, but it now has two rather exciting/interesting features: The Do Not Track HTTP header is now turned on by default, and Adobe Flash Player is built into IE10, both Metro (with a Microsoft-managed whitelist) and Desktop (no whitelist).

The Flash context menu pops up in a rather odd location in Metro IE10

In practice, built-in Flash works exactly like Chrome. Performance and stability seems to be OK. Metro IE10, with a whitelist, works on most major sites (YouTube, Vimeo, Armor Games, etc) but not all (Addicting Games). It remains to be seen how proactively Microsoft will add and remove sites from the Flash whitelist.

IE10, both under Metro and on the Desktop, is still very fast indeed. Check out Microsoft’s IEBlog for more details on IE10 Preview 6.

New stock Windows 8 Metro apps

With the Release Preview, most of the old stock apps have been updated, and three new ones have been added: Travel, Sports, and News. These apps do exactly what they say on the tin, and throw in lots of big, pretty photos for good measure.

It’s not shown in the video above, but you can finally pin specific parts of apps to the Start Screen — you can pin a folder/label from your email to the Start Screen, for example.

Conclusion

Despite the multi-monitor changes and the sharp, flattened, Metro-inspired desktop UI, Windows 8 Release Preview still feels resolutely clunky on the desktop. If you just stick to Desktop apps, then the clunkiness is minimal — but as soon as you weave Metro apps into the mix, and moving the Start Screen between monitors, the whole caboodle gets complicated quickly.

The fact remains that the Start Screen and Metro apps are still very hard to navigate using the keyboard. Metro apps (seemingly as a rule) don’t have keyboard shortcuts — all you have is a handful of global shortcuts, and then frantic mashing of the tab key to move between UI elements. Ultimately, as far as desktop computing goes, it’s impossible to ignore that Windows 8 is only an incremental upgrade to Windows 7.

Whether the new UI, slight performance improvements, and a handful of neat new featuresare enough to justify widescale adoption of Microsoft’s new OS on home, office, and enterprise PCs remains to be seen.