Windows Vista Add A New Font Dialog

There is a dialog in Windows that hasn't changed since the Windows 3.x generation.  If you're in the Fonts folder, the context menu has an option to "Install a new font...".  Clicking this option provides the decade plus old dialog box.  I have been telling Microsoft about this issue for the last TWO years.  Since there has been no change, I recently wrote a quick article about this on Bink.nu.  Unfortunately, this article is now being used to prove why Mac OS X is better, why Microsoft doesn't care about Vista - just to name a few of the wrong points to take away from my article. 

Microsoft's response on this whole thing, is that no one uses this feature, and since drag and drop is another way to install fonts, there is no use in fixing this minor dialog for use in the current century.  How did I find the dialog?  Well, one day, long ago, when Windows 3.1 was the biggest and the best we had, I used this dialog.  The whole "Drag and Drop" story wasn't really there during those days, and there was no Explorer!  File Manager didn't have any type of extension for the Fonts folder (I don't even think the shell extension concept was around then...), and the only way to add Fonts was in the Control Panel.  Naturally, when I used later versions of Windows, this Font dialog was second nature to me, so I found it and used it to install Fonts.

Now, I may be a weird user that actually uses the "Add A New Font" dialog in Windows, but for years I have thought of ways to expand and improve it.  For one, it should search your system for all font files, and show you previews of the found fonts (and not just the font's name).  It would be simple to use, so that installing a font never took more then two clicks, and it would appear in a modern Windows Vista task dialog.  When selecting a bunch of fonts, if a font already exists on the system, it should be skipped automatically (this is behavior is different then today, and it certainly isn't ideal), and it should have an animated font installation copy dialog (kind of like the new File Copy windows).

Now, this may be a lot of work for Microsoft, but it would be certainly worth it.  It's a way to turn a non-feature into a positive, and a way to make sure Windows Vista is all around polished.  Maybe this could make a Vista service pack :-).