“Vista’s user interface suffers from more ‘friction’ than its predecessor XP, a French analyst said today, and is actually a step back for Microsoft Corp. in its pursuit of Apple Inc.’s Mac OS X,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld.

Keizer reports, “In a reprise of research published last year, French analyst Andreas Pfeiffer oversaw testing of what he calls ‘User Interface Friction,’ the fluidity and/or reactivity of an operating system to commands. He likens UIF to the reaction — fast or not — when stepping on a car’s accelerator. ‘We realized that there are many things you don’t easily capture when you do normal benchmarking, such as elements in the user interface that slow down the user,’ Pfeiffer explained.”

Keizer reports, “Among the tests run last year — when Pfeiffer matched up Windows XP against Mac OS X — and this year, when he added Vista, were benchmarks that quantified menu latency, common desktop chores, and precise mouse positioning.”

“‘Windows XP was a major step forward from Windows 98, but Vista is back to where 98 was,’ Pfeiffer said… In every benchmark, Windows scored significantly poorer than Mac OS X, which is far more ‘fluid’ than Microsoft’s OSes, according to Pfeiffer,” Keizer reports.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Looks like times are tough in the business of faking Macs. And it’s about to get much tougher.

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