To be fair to Microsoft, there's always a zillion bugs in a developers' preview - you're not going to have clean code when a project has just hatched. I'm not looking for bugs here, and I'll forgive them when I see them. What I'm trying to determine is whether this new design philosophy works. I've told my readers before that a company can't mesh two design motifs together in the same computer and expect even users who like one way or the other, to make sense of them both simultaneously. The first time I made that point in print was in reference to the Apple IIgs.

This point can't be made any clearer than when you discover (at least for now) there are two Web browsers in Windows 8.

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You may have, and even use, more than one Web browser on your PC. Maybe it's Internet Explorer and something else - perhaps Firefox, perhaps Chrome. Would you need two Internet Explorer 10s? ("Internets Explorer 10?") If Windows 8 ends up looking a lot like the developer previews we're seeing this week, there will be two IE10 browsers, both of which may be running simultaneously - one for Metro, one for the Desktop.

Why? There's an architectural reason (for now) why Windows 8 needs an IE10 renderer for Metro - the environment for Web apps and the new Start Screen - that's separate from the Desktop. Metro apps designed to use the new WinRT system library are rendered using Trident, the IE10 rendering engine. We're told the security scheme for installing and running Metro apps has different requirements than the one used for Desktop apps. Different interfacing requirements require separate apps.

That'll be interesting. Securing the Web browser and imposing protocols for applications to adhere to that security, has been a thankless effort for Microsoft for years. It'll be hard to imagine malicious users bored with the whole cross-domain scripting saga, ignoring the opportunity to try a cross-browser scripting exploit.

A common user from Earth will want her favorite Web sites in both browsers. When she pins them to one, she'll expect those pins to appear in the other, unless there's some distinction between the browsers that will be meaningful to the user. And there's not.

But even the security issue is not the most important point. What I've heard from Microsoft this week in defense of the two-Web-browser scenario is that this gives users a choice. They can run in this fun, new, gadget-less world, or in the familiar world they've already come to love. (We've heard the word "love" a lot from Microsoft in marketing this preview.)

The problem is, the choice is meaningless. If this were a smartphone instead of a PC or a tablet (which, let's face it, is a PC), users would not be afflicted with a similar choice. Too many options for mobile users become obstacles. If this tablet PC is supposed to be mobile, then you don't need for the kinds of options you give desktop or laptop PC users to obstruct mobile users.

One possible solution which was probably considered was to create two "modes" for Windows 8, one more "PC-ish" and one more "mobile-ish," and maybe have OEMs implement some kind of physical switch between the two. The argument against modes, which I heard this week directly from Windows President Steven Sinofsky, was that you don't want to give users options that, for them, will be meaningless. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Next page: More video, including the search for the easy way out...