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I’ve been running Windows 7 for a while now, and just updated to RTM. At first glance, it’s a little disappointing to see how much like Vista it really is. But in fairness, it’s not terrible. Here are 5 pros and 5 cons to Windows 7.

PRO 1 - Nice maximize/restore functionality

Oddly as it sounds, this feature has really grown on me. It makes a lot of sense, and yes, Linux had it first. But in any case, in Windows 7 you can drag a window to the top of the screen to maximize, and drag a maximized window away to restore it’s size. It’s simple but you’ll find yourself picking it up quickly. Hopefully it doesn’t throw people off too much!

CON 1 - Control panel disaster
Apparently  Microsoft can’t figure out how to lay out the control panel. Here’s a hint - rip off Mac OS X. Anyhow the normal view doesn’t show all the settings, and the full view has way to many - yet somehow not enough. I constantly find myself playing “Where’s Waldo” to find stupid things like sharing printers and whatnot

PRO 2 - Nicer Interface

The looks are fresher. I hated vistas blue and green colors, and the weird “Max Headroom” laser design that was everywhere. I would describe the new theme as blue and organic. Lots of Web 2.0 birds and floral design throughout which oddly works without getting too cluttered. It’s nice, hopefully they stick with it.

CON 2 - It’s still Vista

Yeah this is a biggie. Nothing new is supposed to break in 7, and it offers improved XP compatibility - but deep down it’s still the same ugly reject it was a few years ago. Hopefully for Microsoft, people will just perceive it as something different, something they proved it possible in the Mojave experiment. (And oh yes, it still nags about everything like Vista)

PRO 3 - Lay out of some commonly used items

Things are located where they should be for the most part. Right clicking the desktop lets you change themes and resolution, the start menu has shut down. These types of things that Vista screwed up, 7 restores to their rightful places.

CON 3 - Lame Taskbar

Way to rip off Apple, and get it wrong completely. Novice users are going to have fun with this one. It’s easy to confuse what’s open and what’s not. It’s also ease to lose track of what you have open. People are going to stumble on this, I guarantee.

PRO 4 - Fast Startup

Although I’ve been experiencing more and more slowness, the startup is quicker than Vista’s. Also, it’s prettier. I really didn’t like Vista’s progress-bar-only thing. That was weird!

CON 4 - No classic start menu

People will probably hate this, although the new one is nice when you get used to it. Hopefully you forced yourself to adapt to it in Vista!

PRO 5 - ISO image burning

Handy dandy ability to burn ISO’s from right-click.

CON 5 - Performance

Yes, I realize 7 boasts improved performance. But it is still not the lean system it could be. It won’t run on NetBooks as well as XP or CURRENT versions of low-fat linux.

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So in summary, I give MS credit for listening to users. They’ve honestly fixed some issues from Vista. But, overall, it’s still the same OS deep down. At least this one is a step in the right direction.

When it comes to web browsing in Linux, it’s usually FireFox that tops users’ lists. But as great as FireFox is, I’ve found it sort of clunky - especially on NetBooks like the Asus Eee PC. As you might know, Google has brought chrome over to the Linux platform as a developer preview. And in my experience, Chrome really hauls it under Linux!

So is it time to set aside FireFox and make Chrome the default Linux browser? (Can you imagine Ubuntu or Fedora with Chrome, and NOT FireFox?) Well, maybe. Chrome and Google are going down their own route with their NetBook-minded OS, but that’s another story entirely. My point right now is, Chrome makes an excellent browser for Linux boxes, and is especially suitable for netbooks.

Today, we have a developer preview of Linux Chrome to play around with. It’s a bit of a tease, since it runs great but is stripped down. This entry will go through a few little hacks to get Chrome to do what you want in linux.

The Annoying Nag Page

No matter what you set as your home page in Chrome, it’ll always load to a screen that explains it’s a developer preview only. It’s worth reading and all, but once is probably enough to look at this thing. The page is actually “about:linux-chrome” - and even if you change it to something else in Settings, you’ll start back here again when you reload the application. My first attempt was to go through the configuration files and manually change it there. That didn’t work either.

So how do we resolve this? Kind of simple actually! Just pass the name of a page as a parameter. So if you use “google.com/ig” as your start page, you can use the command “google-chrome google.com/ig” to always start at your homepage. Actually, maybe you should use the command “google-chrome metalbabble.com”

In any case, I had an application launcher for chrome on a toolbar, I just set the command to what I have above, and presto. Works perfect, like it should! No TRACE of the nag screen.

No Flash / No Plugins

Here’s another must-have as far as I’m concerned. This one can be solved in a similar fashion - passing extra parameters to chrome. So, to enable plugins you use “google-chrome -enable-plugins” Pretty obvious, huh?

So to use these two command line switches together you’d have something like “google-chrome -enable-plugins google.com/ig” Just go into any shortcuts you have on your menus or toolbars and use these switches. Heck, get really fancy and write yourself a shell script.

Final Thoughts

Chrome is neat. It’s neat, but I never had a good reason to drop FireFox or Safari to start using it. However, in Linux, and especially on my NetBook, the performance and clean interface is well worth it. And if you can’t wait for the real deal then at least you can now get by with a couple of the essentials!

Have fun & let me know what you think!