Hello guys! As you may know, yesterday the Developers Preview (or pre-beta as they also call it) of Windows 8 was released.
The interface is obviously a lot different, and the OS contains a lot of changes "under-the-hood" so I'm not sure if Sandboxie will function well, or even at all, but I have Windows 8 downloading now and then I'm gonna try to find the time to test it out and when I do, I'm going to try also testing Sandboxie on Windows 8!

I'll let you know if it works correctly or not, hopefully it'll give us a good idea of what the final build of Windows 8 will be like.

I don't think it would work, the driver in Sandboxie checks for specific versions of Windows.

But would be interesting to see some screenshots of Windows 8.

Yeah, you're right, Sandboxie installer checked my Windows version and refused to install, but it worked when I set compatibility mode to Windows 7.
Unfortunately though, the driver wouldn't start correctly.


Anyways, as for some pictures of Windows 8....



Here's the Sandboxie Messages window telling me the driver won't start correctly




Also here's the new Start Menu in Windows 8...








As you might imagine, it's extremely hard to open programs on Windows 8...
Actually, I'm not even sure what the "correct" way of opening them is?


I'll show you what I mean (this will also give you a chance to see the GUI).
I find that if you hover over the start menu (you can't click it or it brings you to the start screen) and then click "Search" from the "Start menu" you see above, a green window will slide out from the side.






Then you can scroll down the list and click "Apps".






Then type in what you're searching for...




Finally click it to open and here it is.







Also here's that "Start Screen" with nothing changed.




I also discovered that if you scroll all the way to the right, it shows Sandboxie icons for some reason (maybe this is where apps you've installed go?).







I have to say though, I'm not impressed.
As I suspected, MS focused too much on the tablet when designing Windows 8 and even forced the "Tablet GUI" onto us, even in the "Classic" mode we're all used to, I mean where's the start menu we all love?
Using Windows 8 feels like having to relearn Windows all over again, only now you have to also learn a touch oriented "tablet interface" as well, while trying to balance two different GUI's in one OS!

Thanks for the screencaps SnD

My first thought is "where the heck did the start menu go?!?" It seems that Microsoft accidentally the whole UI on this one
I can see a pattern emerging where you have one really good OS, that everyone uses for 5-10 years followed by a meh one. Its like they screw it up on purpose so everyone complains and looks forward to their next iteration to save the day

Observe:

Win95/Win98/Win2k/ ME/XP/Vista/ Win7/Win8

So a few questions:
Did you get this thru a leak or official channel?
What is bitbox from your last shot, is this a preinstalled app?
What is the performance of this version, is it bloated or faster than win7?

I hope Microsoft includes a GUI for men.

It seems Microsoft are increasingly targeting the 'Mac demographic'

Yeah, the photos don't do it justice, you literally have to experience how painful it is to navigate around the OS and perform the simplest tasks.


Agreed. With MS, usually every other OS sucked, but Windows 8... my god, it's basically unusable! I mean, at least all previous iterations of Windows from 95 to Windows 7 all had the same layout, whether they were bad or not. Windows 8 just takes everything that was bad about Windows and exemplifies it in one OS, and to add insult to injury, they completely redesign the layout for Windows 8 too!


1. I got it from http://dev.windows.com
2. I'm not sure what bitbox is, but it is included by default. I didn't try clicking it though cause alot of the "tiles" don't work, atleast in my case.
3. It's hard to tell cause I tested it inside a VM (with VirtualBox) instead of natively, but compared to how Windows 7 feels in a VM I would say Windows 8 is slower as a whole.
Though the fancy effects (like switching from the start screen to classic desktop, or clicking on a tile) are at least smooth.


I'll just stick with Windows 7 if this is the crap they're gonna pull.


I don't think they're targeting Mac users. I have a Mac and it's nothing like Windows 8.
Instead, I think MS just lost their mind, or they're targeting insane asylum patients, maybe both?

I wouldn't count Windows 8 out yet - I'll reserve judgement until the public Beta is out. Until then, Windows XP all the way haha. Unfortunately by 2014, I'll have to move to Windows 7 or 8 (or 9?).

Nice pictures SnD.

From what I read in another article, apparently the idea with the start button displaying the Metro grid rather than the start menu, is to get you to put your shortcuts/programs on the Metro grid? So rather than the current workflow of click Start button -> select something from Start menu, you click Start button -> select something from Metro grid. What do you think?

The Sandboxie Start menu items appearing on the Metro grid (per your last screenshot) also seems to reaffirm this point.

But all in all this does seem encouraging in that Sandboxie icons do have place in Windows 8, either as icons in the Metro grid, or the standard lower-right tray area in desktop mode.

Probably won't rush to make Sandboxie compatible with Windows 8. I did that with Windows 7 beta and spent time to adjust all the undocumented stuff to a particular Windows 7 beta build and then a later beta build came along and shuffled everything around and I had to redo the work. So I learned my lesson and will wait a bit this time.

* * *

Finally as for speed, it might be an unoptimized debug build so people could help them troubleshoot stuff. I'm just guessing about this, I have no idea.

You're right, the start screen seems to replace the start menu, however it doesn't change the fact that it is very cluttered. The start menu we all love lists all your programs in a neat alphabetical list, with each program (and all it's shortcuts) consolidated into it's own folder in the start menu list. But in the start screen there is no organization, so it take's much longer to scroll to the program you want!
Also the start menu lists your most used programs in the start menu, in order from most to least used so you usually don't even have to go to "All Programs" anyways, but not so with this new start screen.
Also because there is no "normal" start screen, there are tasks you can't perform now, or it takes longer to perform. For example, right now click Start, right click Computer (or My Computer) and click Properties.
Now do that with this new "start menu".... exactly.


I don't blame you for waiting this time, especially when it involves Windows 8! Look at the new GUI, programs and API's, Windows 8 may be even harder than coding for previous builds of Windows!

Just by briefly reading about it, it seems like the Metro thing is just an ecosystem of .NET/Silverlight/Javascript apps, and these platforms/frameworks generally work under Sandboxie. So my hope is that the traditional/desktop stuff will work the same as on earlier Windows, once I adjust the internals of Sandboxie specific to a particular version of Windows. But I won't be surprised if it turns out to be more complicated than that...

You can install sandboxie through compatibility mode just fine. It just crashes if you try to launch it =p

I personally am loving Windows 8. It needs some polish/ bugfixes but I like the UI and I can't wait for the new filesystem.

Yikes. I see a lot fo stuff in here... as someone who is runnign Windows 8 Dev as his main OS (and only) I think I'll take it upon myself to answer some questions and clear somethings up.


Same as that guy, official channel.
As he said, many tiles aren't working yet.
It's lighter than 7, I use about 700MB on startup with virtually no tweaking. The UI is also FULLY hardware accelerated so switching between your desktop and metro is instant and flawless.

The new filesystem will also bring around better performance.


This is in fact exactly correct. The standard UI is virtually identical to Windows 7, almostno difference at all. It's once you try to go to the start menu (or hit the windows key, samething) that you see the app tiles.

Functionally it is literally the same, but with one big screen instead of a small start bar area. You start typing and it searches for you - just as with your regular start menu bar.



Yes, they appear automatically and you can move them around.



Try to get used to it and realize taht you can search through literally anything in the start menu by just startin to type. You can also organize it yourself. It also organizes itself alphabetically if you hit "apps" (hit down button and enter to quickly do this)


Yes, you can move tiles around however you like.

There are a few limitations that I expect to be removed, like adding a random .exe to it.


I'm sure there's a fairly simple way. There are lots of new shortcuts now. For example, windows key + e opens explorer.


Actually the API looks really nice from what I've seen.

If you watch Microsoft talk about it they show programs on Windows 7 literally being copied (source) and pasted over to Windows 8. They add something like 3 lines and it runs perfectly.


I realize people never like UI changes and Metro seem slike such a radical change, but you really just have to understand that the tiles page is literally your start menu and that's it. I see it so rarely and when I do use it it's so much easier.

I found a post at www.askvg.com which discusses some of the new security in Windows 8 - a lot of it is boilerplate like "enhanced windows defender" but there was some meat in the post:


>Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). ASLR was first introduced in Windows Vista and works by randomly shuffling the location of most code and data in memory to block assumptions that the code and data are at same address on all PCs. In Windows 8, Microsoft extended ASLR’s protection to more parts of Windows and introduced enhancements such as increased randomization that will break many known techniques for circumventing ASLR.

>Windows kernel. In Windows 8, Microsoft brings many of the mitigations to the Windows kernel that previously only applied to user-mode applications. These will help improve protection against some of the most common type of threats. For example, Microsoft now prevents user-mode processes from allocating the low 64K of process memory, which prevents a whole class of kernel-mode NULL dereference vulnerabilities from being exploited. Microsoft also added integrity checks to the kernel pool memory allocator to mitigate kernel pool corruption attacks.

>Windows heap. Applications get dynamically allocated memory from the Windows user-mode heap. Major redesign of the Windows 8 heap adds significant protection in the form of new integrity checks to help defend against many exploit techniques. In addition, the Windows heap now randomizes the order of allocations so that exploits cannot depend on the predictable placement of objects—the same principle that makes ASLR successful. Microsoft also added guard pages to certain types of heap allocations, which helps prevent exploits that rely on overrunning the heap.

>Internet Explorer. For Windows 8, Microsoft implemented guards in Internet Explorer to prevent an attacker from crafting an invalid virtual function table, making these attacks more difficult. Internet Explorer will also take full advantage of the ASLR improvements provided by Windows 8.

Probably means some work for Tzuk!

Yes, the security enhancements in Windows 8 are very nice.

Changes to the kernel means changes to Sandboxie as well.