Windows Vista has ruined Alt-Tab 30 Jul 2007

Despite looking a lot flashier, Alt+Tab is a lot less usable in Windows Vista than it is in XP. (For the uninitiated: Alt-Tab is a Windows shortcut that lets you quickly toggle between open documents).

Here's how Alt-Tab looks in XP:

...and here's how it looks in Vista:

As Smileycat points out:

"While it might seem on paper that displaying thumbnails of each application is a good idea, in reality it makes ALT+TAB harder to use.

"The problem is that thumbnails are too small to be useful, so I still find myself relying on the icons, which as they are now combined with the thumbnails, are harder to see.

"In addition, whereas in XP it was easy to read the details of the application you were cycling through, now that the black text is overlaid onto a blue (slightly patterned) background in Vista, it is harder to read.

"Looking at the screenshots above it might seem that the Vista implementation is the better one, but when you're actually using it to quickly switch between applications it clearly is not."

...Another example of something that looks great, but performs poorly.