The engineers in charge of development of Windows 7 (Seven) give details in turn on their blog some of the main innovations of the next operating system from Microsoft. They have recently focused on the evolution of the taskbar and the disk space that will occupy the system once installed.


The new taskbar

As we have seen in some screenshots and previously published after remaining substantially unchanged since Windows 95 taskbar with Windows 7 experience a significant change.

So in order to remove some duplication between the Quick Launch bar and the application switcher, these two functions will be unified.The bar is higher by 10 pixels and displays icons larger applications often used in addition to those in operation at the expense of the text that appears alongside more recent.In referring to applications that appear multiple times in the Dock of Mac OS X if they are minimized, developers indicate that "although other operating systems have similar concepts, a difference in our approach is that applications n 'once appear in the taskbar, whatever their status. " It is also now possible to move the icons in this bar, while progress bars are represented directly under them.

The miniatures are still the party but become interactive: a single icon in the taskbar can if necessary give access to several miniatures representing each of the windows (or, and this is an important novelty, the tabs) of the application. The overview of one of these miniatures can highlight the window you are in real size, by hiding all other on the fly.


Lists of Jump also make appearances. These may be different from one application to another.So right-click the Word icon allows you to display the list of the most often used, while a similar display the historical fact with the Internet Explorer icon, or basic actions ( play, pause, next track) with Windows Media Player.


The icons service (those that appear to the left of the clock) finally may be placed in a separate area.Another new masterpiece, the date now appears alongside the hour.


The Start menu has meanwhile not changed much.

A more efficient disk space

Ironically, innovation is accompanied these days by the introduction of storage media flash (SSD) whose capabilities are charging much lower than those of their hard drives.This is one of the reasons that push the development team of Windows 7 to dwell on the problem of disk space required, margin optimization transfer rate and access time on such devices, already mentioned in our columns.

Windows Vista SP1 for example weighs just over 2 GB once installed, nearly 1 GB of drivers that are stored that you have indeed devices or not, in order to allow their connection and their detection hot without prior installation.It would be viewed with Windows 7 to secede from that mass of drivers, since most machines are now connected to the Internet permanently.

It is however not known exactly how Windows 7 will eventually, but the developers indicate that the Beta is not representative.