The biggest UI change in the upcoming, still-in-beta Windows 7 is the system’s new taskbar.
Up until Windows 7 showed up, the taskbar was not much more than a way to manage open windows and applications. But with the new OS, the taskbar is now an application launcher. True, the old Windows taskbar could hold shortcuts to apps, but it was nothing like the Dock - the whole “mini-launcher” section was kinda janky. The Mac’s Dock was a far better application launcher - allowing users to place their favorite apps at the bottom or side of their display for quick access.
On the flip side, the Dock sucks at telling users what windows are open in Finder. In fact, unless a folder is minimized, there is no visual feedback in the Dock that the folder is open somewhere on the screen. Of course, Expose and Spaces help with this shortfall.
As with most things, the middle ground is the best… and Windows 7 is aiming for a taskbar that takes the best of the Dock and adds it to the best of the old Windows UI and create something that is a useful windows manager and a great app launcher.
Gizmodo takes a look at what’s changing with Windows 7:
The challenge of learning a totally new Windows behavior is the cost of getting this huge step forward in UI. The superbar makes Windows way more conducive to running tons of applications, since it’s actually possible to find apps and precisely the window you want in a second, no matter how bad the shitstorm on your desktop is. In this sense, it’s a better application manager than the Dock, from which, generally speaking, you can’t do much more than jump to open applications or close them.
It’s true that it’s actually less necessary for the Dock to be a superpowered wunderkind—Spaces gives you multiple desktops to work on, and Expose is pretty fantastic. It’s faster, though if you’ve got too many windows, the thumbnails are too small to be useful. Aero Peek solves this issue nicely by letting you quickly cycle through full-screen windows. The superbar has a button in the bottom right corner that works sort of like an OS X Expose hot corner, instantly making every window transparent so you can see the desktop—clicking will actually clear everything away.