Anyone used Vista or IE7?

[John Smith]

I've been having a play with Microsoft Vista today - for those who don't know, Vista is the forthcoming replacement for Windows XP.

There are good and bad things for those of us with KC. Microsoft have really put some effort in to assist those who need assistance: as soon as the installation finished, there was a box to turn on high-contrast, large fonts, or a screen reader called Narrator.

I didn't play too much with Narrator, as I found it rather annoying; but as a freebie I'm sure some people will find it useful.

I also played with the opposite function: speech to text. This one is rather good. In a quiet room, the fairly short tutorial learned enough about my voice to be quite accurate. It also prefers UK English accents (allegedly - don't know how it would cope with Welsh or Scots accents) and faithfully reproduces spoken sentences. It even uses context to choose the right words/spellings. You can also use it instead of the mouse and keyboard to control the whole machine, though I did find typing URLs to be a bit tricky (I admit I gave up and went back to the keyboard).

Anyway, on to the big bugbear for me, and I wanted to know what people think before I whinge to Microsoft.

Currently with IE, if you hold CONTROL and scroll the mouse wheel, the TEXT alone on a well-written web page will change size. Poor pages will do nothing.

With IE7 (shipped with Vista, and will be available sometime soon for XP too) the behaviour is very different.

Now, Ctrl-scroll will change the "Zoom" of the entire window. Sounds good in theory, as it will enlarge graphics as well as text. The problem comes with the way it does it.

It assumes that the "standard" 100% render of the web page is sacrosanct. Even the white space on that page is enlarged when zoomed in. This means that very well-written pages which are fluid in nature (like this one!) instantly lose their fluidity. Zoom them to anything above 100% and you WILL have a horizontal scroll bar. The site could re-flow itself to fit, but that's a no-no.

(here's a visual example of the problem: Example)
So we're moving from a browser where text resizing works sometimes to a browser where page resizing will always kill the usability of the page.

To be fair, the text size can still be changed the current way, but only by going to the Tools/Text Size/Larger menu; which isn't as intuitive or as wonderfully fluid as the ctrl-scroll method in use now.

What do others think? Personally, I think it sucks so badly I won't be using IE7 (Opera or Mozilla beckon!)

[Tammy Again]

I've only just converted to Windows XP from Windows Millenium at home....

bet there will be some other probs with it, how does it work with Zoomtext???


Tam

[Andrew MacLean]

Mac users of the world unite. We have nothing to lose but our Operating Systems.

[jayuk]

John

We are deploying to some 3000 nodes and currently testing Vista...and the current view is that we stick with XP SP2 until Vista has been SP'd! Even after assurances from MS........Its just not an option. Whilst they have tried to ensure enterprise' will take this up as soon as...Its stil the same Old MS!...wait for the release let everyone else have the pain, let MS sp the O/S and then think of deploying lol

J

[John Smith]

Excellent idea Jay. I've been playing with RC1 and it certainly isn't stable enough. Leaving aside the drivers issues, I couldn't even visit the MS web site using the 64 bit version of IE7 as it used Flash, which the 32 bit IE is fine with, but the 64 bit really dislikes!

What are your opinions of the ZOOM feature though?

[Lesley Foster]

Lesley.

[jayuk]

The zoom feature worked fine if you got a decent enough Graphics card.....otherwise I found it grainy......but then I was using standard builds DELLs I think.......

The problem with Vista, is that they have rewritten the roadmap soo many times for it that by the time it gets released and SP'd it will be outdated more so than the previous were.....yet MS have commited to there average time between O/S's now....to I think 4 or 5 years?....cant recall which one it was.....as its just way to expensive to keep uograding....dont ya think?

[Amarpal]

To scared to use IE7 again, when I had it installed for a few weeks it totally ruined my computer! Tried to fix it, ended up having to format the disk!

[John Smith]

Eek! I'm glad I tried it on a spare drive then!

[James Colclough]

As a PC and mac user, I must say the latest mac os offers far more for the visually impaired