Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, is not even released as of yet, but it is already receiving a great deal of praise from beta testers and tech journalists. Microsoft has tried to remain open about its development of the new operating system through the Windows 7 Team Blog, through social bookmarking sites like Twitter, and through the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

In that spirit of openness, Microsoft released some of the Windows 7 concepts that were abandoned at the MIX conference in Las Vegas. TechRadar shows off the designs here.

Here are some of those trashed concepts and some of the notes from the design team:

Some of the team's notes on the icons in the taskbar.

Using different right click menus for different icons was ditched because it was too confusing for users.

An interesting idea for a visual thumbnail taskbar...

A concept previous to the Aero Peek feature that lowlights the selected window's surroundings.

Here we see the lava lamp concept for taskbar thumbnails. Theoretically, thumbnails would come into view live lava from a lava lamp?

Here are some more notes with ideas for thumbnails, some of them intriguing.

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