So, it looks like we get two operating systems for the price of one. It has two styles of apps: one more suitable for a phone (a.k.a. “Metro” style) and the other suitable for desktop. Metro apps are always full screen, they cannot be closed and do not support right click.

The whole experience is completely schizophrenic: there are two main desktops, two versions of Internet Explorer, etc. Interestingly enough, two Internet Explorers report slightly different user agent strings to the web servers:

Metro:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; Trident/6.0)

Desktop:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/6.0)

It looks like the old explorer is a 32 bit process, while the new one is 64 bit.

The old one is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer, the new one in C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer, they have slightly different file sizes, but the same version number (10.00.8102.0). The last part is totally uncool: number one rule for versioning is that if two released files are different, they must have different version numbers, or you are asking for a maintenance nightmare. Well, this is still an evaluation version…

But, as A.S. Pushkin used to say, “You cannot hitch a trembling doe And horse up to a single carriage“. And I am afraid Microsoft is trying to do just that.