The magic of quicklook isn’t really about the behavior in Finder, though. The magic of it is that it’s available as an API to developers. I use an app that is ostensibly marketed as an image viewer but, because it uses quicklook to render file content, it can open all the file types that quicklook supports.

Being able to use an image viewer to cycle files in a zip archive (without extracting them) and be able to render anything from images to spreadsheets to pdf files is pretty remarkable.

You can easily enable this in Windows.

In Explorer, just go to the View tab/menu, enable Preview Sidebar, click on the image, resize the Preview Sidebar as necessary, look at the image, then disable Preview Sidebar again.

Easy /s

Windows Explorer Preview is just not the same. It's either always on or always off, and it takes up space, and it does not pop up above other content.

Quicklook is there only when you want it; it pops up a good sized window on top of anything else, and it goes away just as quickly and easily as you brought it up - spacebar.

Yeah sure. And try to rename a file while it‘s preview loads. Does not work, the flow will break. Sometimes it will just not rename the file. Sometimes it will block the UI as long as the preview is not loaded.

I would never set preview on Windows to the same level as preview on OS X. Because the one on Windows as just not as good.

Seer on the Windows Store is an alternative which works pretty well for the default file types (images, text files, PDFs). However, I don't think it works in the open/save dialog boxes.

Because Windows users have long been dependent on Acrobat Reader (or lately, browser PDF renderers) for showing PDFs. If Apple had a relationship with a third party providing something akin to a system application like Windows and Adobe, they'd happily make a native equivalent and relegate the old product to the dustbin. Windows doesn't do that as much.

It does not stop at PDF / Acrobat. Windows sucks for media and document management. No thumbnails for random media / file types. No playback for random media types. Metadata may be in the files, but who cares? --- the OS makes no sensible use of them except in the details view of "library" folders to show the title and an obscure tab in Explorer's file properties dialog. Calendaring? Sorry, we don't support CalDAV. Email? Well we have IMAP support but it's a footnote. Contacts? God help you, we want you to use Outlook and Outlook only.

Microsoft had to walk a tight rope, historically, for fear of antitrust action. If they had improved Windows too much, big developers would have gone ballistic and dragged them in the courts again. Apple never had to care about this, and it shows.

Microsoft only had to worry about antitrust because of their previous anticompetitive/antimarket behavior. It is easy to imagine ways that Microsoft could have fostered the ecosystem while supporting Quick Look in File Explorer.

You are being downvoted but I think you are onto something.

Preview has been there from the very early days of NeXT and Display PostScript (NeXT worked on DPS with Adobe). Apple’s pdf handling has always been baked in as Quartz is ‘pdf based’.

Neat! I just discovered the gnome alternative gnome-sushi (available via apt-get). It's very nice, but sadly the "open file" dialog doesn't trigger gnome-sushi.