The strong backlash Microsoft received over Windows 8’s modern UI has clearly had an effect on the design and development of the upcoming Windows 9. According to online reports, Windows 9 will no longer feature the Charms Bar, the UI overlay that popped up on the right side in Windows 8 when a user took the mouse pointer to the top or bottom right corners. While users working on Windows 8 based touchscreen devices could intuitively access the Charms Bar by swiping from the right side of the screen, the process felt forced using a mouse.
Instead, in Windows 9, modern UI style apps will feature some of the elements of the Charms Bar in their title bars while developers will have to enable the ‘Share’ button from the Charms Bar for their respective apps on Windows 9.
Apart from this, Microsoft will also be including Virtual Desktops in Windows 9, a feature already available on Mac OS X and Ubuntu. With this new feature, Windows 9 users will be able to have multiple desktops on one machine differentiated by how they want to use it (for e.g. one desktop could be dedicated to your work documents and software, so every Word Doc you open will open in that desktop, while the other desktop could be your ‘Play’ desktop with music, video playing software and games). Previously, users would have to install third-party software to get multiple virtual desktops on Windows.
All of the above changes are supposed to be a part of the Windows Threshold build but we’re still uncertain whether this means that the updates will be made to a future version of Windows 8.1 or will be introduced on a completely new Windows 9 OS. At the moment, since a Windows 9 preview is expected in the coming months, we assume that the changes will definitely show up in that and perhaps, may be added to Windows 8.1 through an update. The Windows Threshold build is already bringing major changes to Windows including scrapping the modern UI Windows 8 Start Screen with a more traditional Start Menu with modern UI elements. Let’s hope Windows 9 will be better received by traditional Windows desktop users.
Source: The Verge