Vista's UI is a 'step back,' analyst says

27.02.2007
Vista's user interface suffers from more "friction" than its predecessor XP, a French analyst said Monday, and is actually a step back for Microsoft Corp. in its pursuit of Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X.

In a reprise of research published last year, French analyst Andreas Pfeiffer of what he calls "User Interface Friction," the fluidity and/or reactivity of an operating system to commands. He likens UIF to the reaction -- fast or not -- when stepping on a car's accelerator.

"We realized that there are many things you don't easily capture when you do normal benchmarking, such as elements in the user interface that slow down the user," Pfeiffer explained.

Among the tests run last year -- when Pfeiffer matched up Windows XP against Mac OS X -- and this year, when he added Vista, were benchmarks that quantified menu latency, common desktop chores, and precise mouse positioning.

"Menu latency is the time it takes an operating system to display a menu," said Pfeiffer. "In Windows, it's not immediate. That's not a speed or performance issue, but a design choice."

The new UIF data put Windows Vista, and its Aero graphical interface, behind Windows XP, which had showed improvement over earlier Microsoft operating systems. Menu latency, Pfeiffer said, remains a major problem in Vista, which scored 20 percent slower than XP. "Windows XP was a major step forward from Windows 98, but Vista is back to where 98 was," Pfeiffer said.