Submitted by When Windows Vista was released in early 2007, a significant amount of attention was given to the new user interface called Aero, that sets out to give Windows a slicker look and feel and promises more fluid operation. But eye-candy aside, how does the new Aero interface stack up compared to Windows XP and Mac OS X in terms of low-level user interface efficiency? “Windows Vista increases the amount of user interface friction of the operating system. Windows XP and particularly Mac OS X performed better than Windows Vista in these benchmarks.”
We all know the standard test for Windows UI’s. Let’s just say you have to win at Solitaire to see it.
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We all know the standard test for Windows UI’s. Let’s just say you have to win at Solitaire to see it.
That was one of the new “features” wasn’t it? A new Solitaire look. A feature? New? C’mon, it’s the same thing over-glorified from the last, which was already a glorification.
If they were going to update Solitaire, they should have made it more like the Aisleriot software for Gnome.
Personally, I think Aero looks quite slick, but it runs so poorly on hardware that you’d think it’d fly on, and the minimise/maximise/close buttons are too small. Other than that I have other nitpicks about Aero, but those are my main concerns.
For the Desktop Operations timing what were they timing? I really cannot think of anything which would fit into this category which would take even over a second never mind two. Also opening Folder which must be the most common operation, in my experience is much slower on OS X than XP.
I’m usually a Mac Zealot but the one thing I wish was better on OS X was the speed the finder moves from folder to folder. It’s not really a problem but I do notice it when I use a Wintel.
Cannot comment on vista because i’ve never used it but I assume that you can switch off all the animation stuff off which will help.
Step one to improving performance in Vista. Shut off all the “improvements” they added? I still shut off XPs “eye candy” wherever possible.
Yes. Agreed.
Turn off the Pretties -and XP rocks!
In fact just today I turned off some of the Pretties
and left the more functional ones, thus leaving the bright look
but also saving some horsepower.
Yes. Agreed.
Turn off the Pretties -and XP rocks!
In fact just today I turned off some of the Pretties
and left the more functional ones, thus leaving the bright look
but also saving some horsepower.
Or you can get some real “pretties” for XP and make it look Vista-like:
1. Royale Noir Visual Style – http://www.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Enhancements/Themes/Royale-Noi…
2. Vista RTM Wallpapers – http://www.haklabs.com/?p=23 (I’m using Royale Noir with the msoobe wallpaper)
Most of the screenshots of this visual style are outdated older versions. Just trust me on this one. You won’t want to go back to the standard XP themes when you try this.
Edited 2007-03-13 22:00
“I’m using Royale Noir with the msoobe wallpaper”
Does msoobe refer to “M<b/>ICROS~1 out of body experience”? 🙂
Yes. Agreed.
Turn off the Pretties -and XP rocks!
I often see that repeated as popular wisdom, but has anyone ever documented an objectively-measurable performance difference between the “XP” and “Classic” styles?
IIRC, the drivers for the vast majority of video cards released in the last 5 years are capable of doing 2d-acceleration of XP’s transparency/fade effects. The only time I’ve seen a noticeable difference in performance between the XP and Classic themes is when trying to run XP with ancient graphics hardware (as in, something from the pre-Radeon/GeForce days). Other than the period of time immediately after XP had been released (but before proper drivers had been released for most display hardware), that is.
>> IIRC, the drivers for the vast majority of video
>> cards released in the last 5 years are capable of
>> doing 2d-acceleration of XP’s transparency/fade
>> effects.
Good point, but misses the point in a number of ways. Stupid animations like fade effects take TIME, time that could be better spent actually grabbing the menu info to display and by the user actually making choices… Even though I suspect the company this article is about being snake oil salesmen, the best place to hide a lie is between two truths – which is what they seem to have done.
With things like fade/slide effects in particular, the phrase that comes to mind is ‘lands sake, just show me the damned thing’. Real world it’s not even a fraction of a second, but for some people (myself included) that’s all it takes to make them go “wow, this feels really slow”. You turn off the eye candy, it FEELS faster, regardless of whether it actually is or not.
>> I often see that repeated as popular wisdom, but
>> has anyone ever documented an objectively-
>> measurable performance difference between the “XP”
>> and “Classic” styles?
In terms of RAM usage, the difference is only 4-6 megs usually… I do often wonder though if the difference people talk about is more attributable to the above. Turning off the stupid animations makes the windows and menus appear faster – that’s just common sense. In that way it is not so much a matter of available resources on the computer, as the patience (or lack therin) of the user. This is after all, a topic about user experience… and once the wow factor of things like animations wears off and the user realizes they do little more than waste their time – well, I think that’s the ‘friction’ they are referring to.
THOUGH it is worth pointing out that a lot of modern video cards are LESS capable at 2d than some of their progenitors. Banding, device bitmaps, hardware scaling, palette translation, hardware character rotation, independent font render scaling, even hardware scroll bitblt – these are all 2d capabilites found on a voodoo banshee of a decade ago that are curiously missing on todays top end Radeons and nVidia cards. (and with the move to using 3d cores for that, you can pretty much kiss 2d accelleration goodbye)
Which is why you still get DTP and CAD people who clamor for the old Voodoo and Matrox cards. Autocad R14 (which is STILL in widespread use despite being a decade old – hell, I still end up supporting some r12 users because that was the last Mac release – even better many companies have no interest in moving to a newer version…) will STILL render 2d content faster on a Banshee or V3 than a Ge8800 – it’s just a matter of the focus today being different from that of the past.
>> Shut off all the “improvements” they added?
That is true of ANY OS, and actually why OS X pisses me off as you can’t turn off all the stupid cutesy crap, at least not without third party software which actually ADDS bloat instead of removing it.
There’s been a habit among OS designers of late to waste time adding all sorts of cutesy eye-candy bullshit to their operating systems. Transparancies, fades, shadows… GOD FORBID they instead devote time to underlying problems like stability, security, etc. Worse, most of this crap ends up making the OS harder to use, be it transparancies making text impossible to read, smaller and smaller UI buttons that are increasingly vague as to function, spatial navigation with the actual PATH not showing, so you have no idea exactly which folder you are actually in, or uber-graphical task switchers that have less functionality than a simple text list for the simple fact that five open copies of a text editor all kind of look alike.
As I’ve said dozens of times before, if my grandmother can figure out how to be productive in Windows 98, you are ****ing DONE WITH THE UI, LEAVE IT THE **** ALONE. Fix the other stuff, THEN futz with the UI.
But, at least Windows STILL lets you turn all that crap OFF.
That is true of ANY OS, and actually why OS X pisses me off as you can’t turn off all the stupid cutesy crap, at least not without third party software which actually ADDS bloat instead of removing it.
No what is true is that you should use a 30 years old OS such as Unics/Multics. You will be happier with it than using a modern OS.
What pisse me off is users leaving like amish of the computers (and saying that everbody should do so).
Worse, most of this crap ends up making the OS harder to use
Yeah, GUI just sucks. We should all use console instead (command prompt is very efficient to watch video/picture).
As I’ve said dozens of times before, if my grandmother can figure out how to be productive in Windows 98, you are ****ing DONE WITH THE UI, LEAVE IT THE **** ALONE.
Yeah my grandma will be very happy to face a command line prompt instead of its GUI. She will be more productive with that for sure.
Edited 2007-03-13 22:04
>> What pisse me off is users leaving like amish of
>> the computers (and saying that everbody should do
>> so).
I assume you mean ‘pisses’ and ‘living’. Little hint, you want to be taken seriously, especially when attacking a viewpoint, try to be a touch more coherent.
As to your response – wow, cannot attack the position so makes unfair and unrealistic comparisons. Well done, I’m certain you would fit in well in /g/ over on 4chan.
There’s a difference between functionality and goofy eye candy… A difference that’s outright annoying when said eye candy in fact REDUCES functionality compared to it’s predecessor (transparancies come to mind since they make text impossible to read). If you cannot see that difference, enjoy having your dual Xeon perform like a P3.
AS windows itself proves, the goofy eye candy skinning has NOTHING to do with functionality – hence why you can turn it all off and still get the same work done. Comparing that to going back to the command line is just special – in the same way some olympics are special.
Edited 2007-03-13 22:16
command prompt is very efficient to watch video/picture
Actually it can serve that purpose perfectly fine, just try mplayer on framebuffer.
Now if you was talking about advanced image/video edition…
No what is true is that you should use a 30 years old OS such as Unics/Multics. You will be happier with it than using a modern OS.
What pisse me off is users leaving like amish of the computers (and saying that everbody should do so).
As someone who has more-or-less the same feelings as the poster you’re replying to, your anger seems a bit misplaced to me. Personally, I find it rather tiresome when people instantly jump to assumptions of ludditism and respond with reductio ad absurdum arguments whenever someone dares suggest that much of the eye candy in modern OSes adds little practical value. But I wouldn’t say it pisses me off, particularly.
The tone of the original post was pretty mild IMO, it wasn’t exactly an “I’m oh-so-superior to all you GUI-using lower primates” rant. And I think he makes a valid point about development resources being used for eye candy, at the expense of more basic, fundamental features. I especially agree with that point from the perspective of someone who uses XP and BeOS side-by-side daily; BeOS is often criticized here for its “outdated” appearance, but one of the reason I continue to use it is the attention to detail when it comes to basic, mundane features.
As a general principle, I think it makes the most sense to ensure that basic functionality is nailed-down / as polished as possible, before moving on to flashy shiny things. And to give a more specific example, XP has pervasive menu-fading/transparency effects while BeOS has pervasive drag-and-drop support. I know it’s simplistic to assume that those things are mutually-exclusive, but given the choice I know which functionality is more directly useful to me.
Yeah my grandma will be very happy to face a command line prompt instead of its GUI. She will be more productive with that for sure.
It’s funny you should say that – I presume you’re being sarcastic, but I have found that many elderly people actually are more comfortable with command lines and/or interfaces which are primarily text-based. There are about half a dozen middle-aged-to-elderly people I do tech support for who all have fairly recent PCs (purchased in the last 2 or 3 years) along with broadband connections, but you know how they primarily use them? More or less as “dumb terminals” – they use their broadband connections and a terminal app to connect to the local Freenet via telnet. It’s little more than a text menu system with some documentation and “EMail” & “Web” menu entries, which launch PINE and LYNX respectively. I think that the frontend may actually be gopher-based.
“OS X pisses me off as you can’t turn off all the stupid cutesy crap,”
-can you explain exactly what cutesy crap you are refering to? Cus i really have no clue what “cutesy crap” you are talking about.
-the geinie effect, maybe….. that you can get rid of from OSX
-dock magnification?…ditto
-transparency…. why would you need to… apple has done a killer job in it use of transparency.
-expose’…..? you dont have to use it… but if you are using OSX and NOT expose… you are LOST in the f’ wilderness! expose is the biggest contrubution to the desktop GUI since the Mouse. you are a fool if you dont use it!
-dashboard….? againe… you never have to use it! remove all you widgets and desktop take op little if any resources!
-the cube effect in fast users changing?…. how often do you switch users!
ok… the POOF when you remove and icon fromt he dock…. ok…. you got me on that one…. but again…. how offten to you remove an icon from the dock…?
feel free to add something i missed!
Edited 2007-03-14 20:01
Honestly, opening up a folder in Explorer under Vista could (should) be better. The Explorer window opens just fine and all, but it takes a second or two to populate… just seems like the whole fs has a performance issue.
I just tested this out. ‘Computer’ took about 3 seconds to load the first time since all the code supporting it had to be paged in from disk. After that, each folder window took <1 sec. They seemed to appear fully populated.
When I reopened ‘computer’ it took 1.5 seconds. And after a third try it was about down to 1 second. I think ‘Computer’ is slower than the others because it has more “special” items and devices in there that causes more code to run to populate it.
I don’t know what your specs and expectations are, but I’m betting that your folders have varied items for which icons have to be loaded from various places. I wouldn’t be surprised if performance is not instantaneous.
Opening up my home folder (which doesn’t have anything special in it, just other folders and hidden system files) takes about 1.5sec-2sec.
Part of the slowness before was actually due to haveing a DreamScene on, which was sucking down my procesor, pegging it at 100%.
Report done by repeating the same step, in succession, with at maximum 10 repetitions, by (presumably) a single person. No details about the exact steps performed, and how it was accurately timed. This is all but accurate and objective.
But its results mirror my experiences with Windows Vista as compared to Windows XP AND Mac OSX. So I’m happy.
that’s nothing new for me…
Ok, so he’s measuring the latency for menus and the time taken to open a folder, but doesn’t seem to specify which hardware he’s using. Maybe he’s using a slow machine which XP fits on but Vista does not. In things that are actually noticeable, like app launch time and bootup, Vista is faster given sufficient ram (> 1GB and more like 1.5 GB).
“Ok, so he’s measuring the latency for menus and the time taken to open a folder, but doesn’t seem to specify which hardware he’s using.”
He could set MenuShowDelay=”0″ or use something like “TweakUI” to make it faster. 🙂
Mh,
KDE or Gnome would be interessting to compared with Vista, XP and OS X.
In the PDF report the hardware used for the tests are detailed.
In the PDF report the hardware used for the tests are detailed.
Not so much “detailed” as “mentioned in passing”. The CPU was the only spec given– No mention of hard drive, memory or graphics specs. For all I know, they were all populated with 256mb of memory, running IDE hard drives in PIO mode– Or maybe just the Vista machine was.
In fact, looking at the CPU specs, I’m left guessing as to whether it’s an Intel or an Athlon!
The “Dual 2.8Ghz Dell Dimension Workstation” could have, potentially, an Intel Celeron, Pentium D, Core Duo, or AMD Sempron, Athlon, or Athlon X2 (granted, dual celeron or dual sempron is unlikely).
Finally, there’s the human factor– One person, doing these tests, on multiple machines. This tells me that the person probably uses a Mac, and they’re used to the properties of a Mac mouse.
Edited 2007-03-14 03:05
How do they stack up?
I did a quick Google search and the vast majority of the links point to various “reports” about Pfeiffer Consulting and their benchmark. Until today I have never heard of “user interface friction” It sounds like marketing speak to me more than a legitimate term for a specific UI measurement.
The idea of using “trained professionals” as opposed to using a script or program to ensure the steps are carried out in the same fashion and at closely timed intervals is also a bone of contention. And the hardware used has no effect on UI performance? Yeah, right. Where is their data to back that up? Any action performed on a computer requires some amount of CPU, memory and graphics card activity.
Now that OSX has become x86’d, there is no reason why all the tests could not have been performed on the same hardware.
Slag off Vista!
Well, it is fun I suppose…
… what a nonsense!
Microsoft is trying to make the latest greatest version of their operating systems, Vista, look good compared to the competition. Until somewhat recently, the only competition MS had in the, “eye candy OMG this is soo friggin’ pretty” department was OS X.
Enter compiz and beryl… It runs on the same hardware as Windows XP, is hardware accelerated, and runs faster.
Microsoft has done a *great* job with Vista and all, but still doesn’t much compare to OS X or to a modern composited Linux desktop running a window manager such as compiz or beryl. There really isn’t a comparison
compiz and beryl are both not even close to the stability needed to challenge even Aero in terms of eye candy, sure they look good, but by the time they are done with compiz and beryl, Vista SP1 will be out and it will be too late
Funny thing, compiz/beryl run fine on xp hardware. Vista crawls on xp hardware. Vista runs slowly on my HP zd1000 laptop with a decent nvidia card and 1gb of ram.
compiz runs perfectly.
Don’t believe Aero is slower? Look at this just released osnews article:
http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/pfeiffer_vista/
Vista doesn’t crawl on my system, which is an Athlon XP 2800+ with 1G ram and an ATI X1650 pro. It’s almost as fast as XP. It thrashed alot at first, as the different caching subsystems and the indexer did it’s thing, but it’s smooth now. On the same hardware, I had a hell of a time getting beryl to run acceptably under Kubuntu Edgy. So, I guess our experiences are not universal. Who knew? 🙂
Windows Vista increases the amount of user interface friction of the operating system
Increase the sensitivity on your mouse, dude!
i have used vista for a while and my first few posts about it were not nice at all.
I must say now that I have used it more i am still not all that fond of it, but it is not as bad as i origionally thought.
I don’t have any exact benchmarks but I have tried it on 4 different computers and overall it seems to be slower then windows xp. here is my feelings on the various computer results
prescott 3.2 ghz 2 gig pc4000 ram, nvidia 7800gs 256mb
eh…. ran ok, but xp seemed to open apps and folders a little faster.
athlon64 2800+ 2 gig pc3200 ram nvidia 6800xt graphics card
about the same as the prescott, maybe slightly more snappy
macbook pro 1.83ghz core duo 2 gigs pc5300 ram, ati X1600 graphics card
this is where vista shined, vista ran fantastic on my macbook pro, right on par with the speed of XP, but with all the eye candy goodies.
now, just for good measure i decided to try it on a old pc, a p3 500 mhz compaq deskpro with 512 megs of pc133 ram and a nvidia 5600 graphics card and wow…. talk about a lost cause, i got it installed but it was not very usable.
now, just for good measure i decided to try it on a old pc, a p3 500 mhz compaq deskpro with 512 megs of pc133 ram and a nvidia 5600 graphics card and wow…. talk about a lost cause, i got it installed but it was not very usable.
I know this was just for experimentation, but a P3 500 is below the minimum system requirements. You’d need an 800MHz CPU to meet the minimum.
You can almost always install an OS or an app onto a system below minimal requirements, as long as it fits the CPU family. YOu can’t install Vista on P2 systems, but P3 500 MHz should do fine. I’ve seen XP on 200 MHz cyrix.
Yes, but the point is you shouldn’t expect good performance when the system doesn’t meet the vendor’s requirements (i.e., that the P3 500 was almost unusable should be expected given it didn’t meet the minimum system requirements). It’s also an unsupported configuration.
Edited 2007-03-14 12:00
It’s all matter of used HW and user habits. I for one HATE Mac OS X mouse behaviour, it takes me lot longer to get anywhere than with Windows (and no, increasing mouse sensitivity doesn’t help). Vista start search does great job of speeding up many operations – how come it’s not mentioned in this here “analysis”?
I can agree in SOME points, some things are harder to get to than in XP and OS X. But many are SO much easier.
and no, increasing mouse sensitivity doesn’t help
Sorry, that was just a bad joke by me. I just hate the term “user interface friction”. It sounds like consultant-speak!
I wasn’t picking on you :o) I seriously don’t like mouse behaviour in Mac OS X. WIndows, Linux and OSX all have curiously completely different behaviours. I like WIndows best (that is, I am most used to it, sure).
UIF benchmark is the stupid benchmark report I’ve ever read, because it tests the graphics but the report doesn’t say nothing about graphics card used, which drivers, etc. http://pfeifferreport.com/trends/Vista_UIF_Rep.pdf
So, this benchmark is pure FUD and made by incompetent people.
I use Windows Vista on a 5 years old PC with 768MB of RAM and a Geforce 6200 and Windows Vista is very fast, faster than XP. Aero interface gives better responsiveness and a free-glich desktop, because everything is drawn via GPU, freeying the CPU
Edited 2007-03-14 14:23
I’d be very interested to see BeOS UI benchmarks too, I bet it’d beat the crap out of all major OSes! 🙂