InsideMicrosoft

Details Surfacing On Vista And IE7 Betas

All sorts of sites are posting new details about the Vista and Internet Explorer 7 betas. Some stuff you may not know:

• While WinFS is majorly delayed, Vista Beta 1 will have a very powerful search tool, one that Paul Thurott says will put all desktop search products to shame. Called “Find My Stuff”, it will provide Vista with instant desktop search. Also, when WinFS ships, it will make Find My Stuff even more powerful.
• Vista will include pervasive synchronization with all of your devices and all computers, as well as better power management and wireless networking for mobile devices. #
• Vista will have User Account Protection, the reduced privilege mode most Windows users should be using, to protect the system from malicious attacks. #
• Vista will use Metro, Microsoft’s new document publishing technology, accross all applications. Metro will be for Vista like the PDF is for the Mac, a universal document and printing structure that guarantees documents will look and print the same no matter where they go. Best off? Microsoft is releasing Metro as an open, XML-based standard, just like the Office formats. PDF, of course, is not an open format at all. Microsoft will charge royalties for Metro, which should prove a barrier to adoption. #
• Vista has built-in speech recognition any application can use, and learns based on what words are prominent in your vocabulary. #
• Vista has a Games Explorer, that collects all of your games in one place, letting you browse the collection easily. Excellent! #
• IE7 will partially support CSS 2.0. #
• IE7 will have a phishing filter (or “philter”?) that alerts the user when an email may be trying to fool them. I think a phishing filter is more useful for Outlook, alerting you to emails linking to fake websites. #

Some via Marc Orchant

July 27th, 2005 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General | 6 comments