A Short List of Things Windows Does Better than Mac OS X

Unsurprisingly, the Department of Defense and its contractors use Windows, so that means I have been stuck on a Windows box all this summer while at work. My first Macintosh was a Performa 6200CD, so I've been a Mac guy for a long time so using Windows everyday has made me think about some things. In no particular order, here are the things I've noticed that Windows does a better job at than Mac OS X (10.3 Panther):

Window Resizing

I have a 1.8Ghz (single processor) G5 at home, and sometimes when I resize windows (of any size or complication-level) the system lags a bit. It lags about 100 times less than any other Mac I've owned, but it's not instantaneous. The PC I'm on right now is an older IBM box that can't be running past 800Mhz, however, Windows must be optimized for the resizing of windows because it freakin' flies whenever I grab and move the bottom-right corner. Photoshop, Firefox, UltraEdit, it doesn't matter — they all resize in real-time with my mouse movements.

Menubar Interaction

Just like with the window resizing, menus drop down (I'm using Win2000, not XP) extraordinarily fast. Much faster than on my G5, which ticks me off because I can't think of anything I do more with my time than select menu options in applications.

Microsoft Office

Granted Microsoft Office + Windows is Redmond's bread and butter, but it still upsets me that Office 2004 on OS X sucks so bad. I don't care about all the fancy new features and how people love them, I care about the user experience in what I do most when I use Microsoft Office — type and edit text in Microsoft Word. Because Word was never ported over to Cocoa for Mac OS X, the carbon-rendered text looks absolutely revolting and I seriously cannot stand to look at a screen full of text in Word when using my Mac. The anti-aliasing is off just enough to make it look like garbage. Don't believe me? Start typing in 14px Georgia and prepare to find a garbage bag quickly.

Well, that's it. The rest of Windows sucks and the Mac experience is better, but those three points tick me off really bad. Hey Steve, you've got some work left to do for Tiger so get on it!

Comments

[Colin D. Devroe]

I agree with what you've said, and I'm on an extremely less attractive machine than you are. However, I think that MSO has some redeeming features on OS X. I'm not a type or font guru, so perhaps your gripes are warranted - but go almost unnoticed by morons like me.

[Matthew Oliphant]

On window resizing. Not sure if it is a proprietary thing, but I would love it if I could resize a window on a mac from any side or corner of the window.

It's a small thing, but working on XP at my day job and OSX at home, these little things start to add up.

[Eric Vreden]

Gosh, maybe you should zap your pram, and or better yet, re-install your whole system. I'm on a 1.25ghz eMac, and my pulldowns snap down as fast as any Windows box I've seen, and the windows resize as fast as I can drag them around.

[Michael]

14-pt. Georgia looks fine on my Word 2004 installation.
Go to Word > Preferences > Print and disable fractional widths (or enable it if it's not enabled) and see if that helps.

[Dave B.]

Window resizing on the mac is slower because OS X has higher standards for windows resizing. Windows (And MAC OS before X) accomodates slower processors in that allows the enlarged/reduced window space to be rendered later when some spare CPU time is available. This can leave large ugly areas of a windows screen out of date until the cpu is free to render them. Mac OS X user interface architecture and standards does not allow any partial redrawing or sizing of elements. Thus when you resize a window it is not partially redrawn, rather drawing occurs when the processors have completed the whole job. For complicated windows whose internal elements resize with the window, this can weigh on a processor busy with other tasks. Just a difference in philosophy between the two platforms about how you balance percieved performance with aesthetics. With increasing processor speed and sophisticated graphics processors standard, odds are very good that longhorn will copy Apple on this.

[,ilo]

Yeah, Word is ugly. I think it's actually a good word processing program (I'm using v.X), but it is hideously ugly. That's why you should be using Nisus Writer Express. Much nicer, much cheaper, and handles both MS Word and Wordperfect files pretty well (you can use .doc as the base file format). Doesn't do footnotes and tables yet, but those will be added in a matter of weeks, and the upgrade will be free when they are (unlike MS upgrades).

NB that I don't work for Nisus, I just use and like their product and want to see its continued success.

[Paul]

HTML Email. Long time windows user, started using a 17" Powerbook in December. The one thing I can't find an easy way to do from inside OSX is to send an html email, for newsletters and whatnot. In Windows, from inside IE, I can send any page as an html email through Outlook Express, without blinking an eye. Some have suggested a Mailpictures plugin, but others have had bad experiences with that.

HTML Email out of the bag....that's what I need.

[Roger]

Paul,

Most email client applications for the mac have a "settings" or "preference" setting that you can chose file types for email coming and going.

Mozilla: Account settings
Thunderbird: Account Settings

Apple mail does not offer html. Try Thunderbird

roger

[Thel]

Menu access and window resizing are :::screaming::: fast here with Panther 10.3.4 on my lil May '03 1 GHz G4 eMac Combo, with only 640 MB of memory, with most of the superfluous (IMO) eye candy nixed. Under System Preferences > Dock, I changed from Genie to Scale Effect; and under Cocktail (www2.dicom.se/cocktail/index.html) > Interface options, I've disabled window zooming, rectangle effect, and animation.

I honestly couldn't ask for the interface to be any speedier, and have zero problems, even with half a dozen haxies (FruitMenu, Menu Master, ShapeShifter, WindowShade X, etc.) rolling.

Can't comment on Word. (I've been using quirky Quark since '94.)

[Sam]

The ugly font rendering likely has nothing to do with Carbon vs. Cocoa. Both can render fonts beautifully. I suspect it's CoreGraphics vs. Quickdraw. A quick google of the subject came up with a good investigation in the url below. As you can see, actually Carbon has more font rendering capability in many areas, including creating "artificial" variants for bold or sizes that aren't provided by the font.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100148/stories/2002/02/04/macOsX1012FontRendering.html

(By the way, the slow menu pulldown might be BECAUSE of Cocoa, which is a much slower runtime, requiring everything to be dynamically binded at runtime and having no function calls inlined at all. Carbon apps can be much snappier than Cocoa.)

[Steve]

I HATE html email, and keep it as disabled as possible in entourage. I still get tiny fonts sometimes and black text on dark blue backgrounds, but I don't know why.

People who send me newsletters in email send them in PDF form. They look great within Entourage and will print out beautifully if I want hard copy. At least two of these come from PC users, so it is not a Mac-only possiblity.

[Nicole]

Well, it's obviously you and your poor system configuration. I've never used a Mac on a regular basis, but I'm sure it's something you're doing wrong.

[Mike]

Damn G5 just isn't fast enough!

I'm gonna gut the innards and slap a P4 in there, that'll show 'em :)

[nik]

- i have seen the Word problem. This is a bug. I got rid of it by reinstalling word/installing all updates - i am somewhat surprised you would see it on Word 2k4 / mac... i have an older version...

in any case, it's nothing mac- or Carbon-specific. it's a bug in Word.

- have never seen resizing slowness ever since Jaguar. Panther is even better. What version of OS X are you running? Maybe it's time to upgrade. Jaguar made OS X really usable (no lags) and Panther improved some more details.

- i am using win/mac 50/50 and i have to say that there are no mac slowdowns remaining (OK - OmniGraffle is somewhat of a lag, but then, Visio/Win is as well).

On windows, there are _TONS_ of annoying slowdowns, from searching the disk (dead-slow) to just clicking on the start menu (taking an eternity) to opening folders (taking forever).

all of this was super-fast when i first installed windows, but it's all gotten really bogged down. getting slower every week, basically.

my mac now feels way faster than windows, even though the processor is running on half speed (a G4/667 compared to a Pentium-M 1.3, both laptops).

upgrade to Panther.

[Honus]

I know what you're talking about Mike. We've got some eMacs here with the resizing issue. (OS X.3 right out of the box). They're lab machines, and I'm only testing website compatibility on them anyway, so I'm not going to figure out how to fix it. Besides, it's kind of sporadic, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad.

I have no problems with any slowdowns on my Windows boxes. I just tweak the hell out of my slow home machine so there are virtually no visual effects. At work, this computer is more than fast enough to handle it all, so I don't notice any slowdowns, even with all the visual effects.

As an aside, Apple really should stop producing an OS a year. Tiger? I mean that's just downright ridiculous. As part of an educational institution, it's a pain in the ass to license the labs here when there's a new OS every year. And then all the software needs to be tweaked again, locked down, etc. How many times does an entire OS need an overhaul? If Jaguar actually lived up to all the hype, why was there a Panther right on its heels? Innovation is one thing, excess is another.

[David]

Nik, there's a solution for that: every time you're about to install a peice of software, ask yourself: "is this actually something useful, or is it likely to just sit around for several months and then get uninstalled?" Windows will deteriorate no matter what you do, but being careful about what you install can keep it running smoothly for much longer. It also sounds like your hard drive should be defragmented.

[Lefteris]

My new shinning PowerBook G4 15" is really beautiful, connects easily to the net, the dash is funky, but when I need to work I go to my 3.0 MHz Windows XP.

[minami]

I have used XP ever since it first came out, I use it on 3 computers ranging from a P3,P4 and an AMD Athlon. It has worked perfectly and is very fast on all 3. My hubby has a MAC G4 with Jaguar. It is slow, freezes up and the browsers he uses (netscape,mozilla,firebird,safari)freeze also. He has to choose the one that doesn't freeze up. I use 1 browser IE6 of course. I finally caught him hitting his poor MAC! he said it sometimes makes it work better :(
I finally found the Virex on his MAC and hopefully this will clean it up ;)

[Sam]

The whole point of Expose is to remove the need to resize windows. it might just be me but OSX is light years ahead of windows in pretty much everyway shape and form.

Its all down to preference though

[Andy]

hey i am running windows98SE with a 550mhz processor peniumII. and it is a lot faster at resizing the screen than the brand new mac os x that we have at school. oh by the way i am in highschool. and we only have 2 macs but we have over 100 windows. Some XP, some 98, some 98SE, some windows2000, and some are windows NT. I could run XP but all my software is 98 only.

[Andy]

hey i am running windows98SE with a 550mhz processor peniumII. and it is a lot faster at resizing the screen than the brand new mac os x that we have at school. oh by the way i am in highschool. and we only have 2 macs but we have over 100 windows. Some XP, some 98, some 98SE, some windows2000, and some are windows NT. I could run XP but all my software is 98 only.

[bob]

look all I got to say is that a windows slows down as you use it mac doesent mac defrags and indexes it self
it make windows look like a joke in my eyes :)

as for the windows sizes it has to do with the
finder redrawing the entire image a windows
system only redraws what it has to and this can cause
sever problems but it will probaly chang in longhorn
they copied so much from mac thats it is bound to happen sooner or later

[Randel]

Yeah, like I'm going to switch to Windows because "someone" says Mac window resizing and menubar Interactions are slower and "Office 2004 on OS X sucks so bad." BS on the latter by the way as your reasoning reeks of personal preference. Seems like resorting to hair splitting—a possible sign that many Windows users are on the defensive? Relax. There is room in the world for Apple and Microsoft both.

[Chris Verburg (DSL AK)]

Having used Mac for over 20 years and PC's for just as long.
I have never had a serious crash (file destroying or reformatting) or a single virus on the Mac, I gave up counting on the PC years ago.
That's why I'm typing on my 5th Mac right now.

[bob]

yah, macs completely outstrip any pc on the market now adays, esp. since they came out with boot camp. if all those PC entusiast are so addicted to their silly computers, then they can istall windows onto their mac now, and run it separately or side by side. CAn't beat that, can you?