A video has been leaked by a German blog that appears to show what the Windows 9 Start menu will look like.
The video seems to show what the Windows 9 Technical Preview will look like, with the Technical Preview to officially be announced in September or October.
While the images and video have been confirmed to be authentic, they are apparently of a very early build of the upcoming operating system and by no means show the final version. The Technical Preview is essentially made to give developers an idea of what is to come.
It seems as though Windows 9 will take some features of Windows 8 and place them on the classic Windows that we all know and love. We have known for a while that the upcoming operating system would have a pop-up Start menu, as shown in the images, as well as the ability to run modern apps in windowed mode.
While in windowed mode, the Windows Store will now get a button in the top-left corner of the screen. Clicking on this button will give the user a list of options and functions that were before seen in the Charms bar.
In Windows 8 and 8.1, modern apps were made to run in full-screen mode, and they will now be able to run in windowed mode, which is a big step forward.
The desktop taskbar will also get a number of new buttons. The first is a search button that sits right next to the Start button. The next is a button for switching between desktops.
The screenshots do not reveal too much else about the new operating system, except that the Charms menu will no longer exist. Despite this, users will apparently still be able to bring up Charms by pointing to the top right corner.
The Start menu will also offer the standard features that it has in the past, such as Restart and Shut Down. Users who do not want to use the new Start menu will also be able to tell the operating system to use the old one instead.
It is important to remember that all these details may still be changed before the final version of Windows 9 is released, as the company still has not released a public beta of the software.
The final version of Windows 9 is not supposed to be released until 2015, and rumors suggest that there will be a number of changes to address issues in Windows 8.
