But in the article, here's what's pissing me off:
> In Windows 11, the taskbar lost some other quite popular features users enjoyed in Windows 10. For example, you can no longer move the taskbar to the top, right, or left.
Now I'm not a user of this feature. But in my immediate circle, no less than 6 of the many people I know work with windows (maybe 30 folks ?) use the task bar on the left or right (they have different monitor setups)
Sure, it's at best anecdotal, not very significant, but it's been there since the dawn of Windows ... That's really bound to piss off some people
Is it intuitive? I honestly didn't know this was something you could do, and it doesn't seem to work for me. The most I am able to do while dragging something to the taskbar is to pin it to the application that could open it. Other times I just get the same red 'X' as on Windows 11.
Is there a use pattern that I'm just not thinking of?
Your mouse, you mean? Otherwise you have some explaining to do :)
On my personal machine I rarely have duplicate windows, so I can rely on the icons.
That's very strange. I have been a Windows developer since the 90s so I've seen a lot of setups, between other developers and all the users I have had to interact with. So this number is in the thousands easily.
I've never seen a Windows taskbar not on the bottom outside of people just experimenting with layouts, similar to how people experiment with things like WindowBlinds or Classic Shell. I don't recall ever seeing this on a business user or even a developer machine.
I'm not even being hyperbolic here. I don't recall one single instance of remoting into a machine for support, or being sent a screenshot by an end-user, that has the taskbar anywhere but the bottom.
That's since Windows 3.1.
If I count it since 1992, and divide by the number of Windows devs I have met in life, it is pratically zero anyway.
Even just different monitors. While supposedly both are 16:9, my main monitor and my laptop have very different proportions. The laptop feels cramped vertically, so I move the taskbar to the left edge to have more space. Guess I'll autohide it when I upgrade.
I experimented with all four sides. When I last used it on the bottom I often had it "huge" (three or four rows) with auto-hide because I didn't want to cramp vertical space that much. I thought left and top got too much in the way of Fitt's Law related muscle memory. (More applications have important controls like menus to the top and left, and when maximized you are used to just rushing the mouse to the screen corner to access them, having to back across the taskbar never quite worked for me.)
Right-hand side seemed optimal to me in Windows XP and continues to feel that way today, especially as monitors have only gotten wider from when I started on classic square CRTs.
Since Vista introduced "Aero Peek" I felt far less of a need for window titles directly in the Taskbar, so I generally only ever use the Taskbar about the same width as the default height when at the bottom. (I like it just a tiny bit wider than that where on the main monitor in a vertical orientation Windows expands out the full date and day of the week in the clock panel.) At those widths my right side taskbars take up far fewer total pixels (and especially far fewer total unused "whitespace" pixels) on widescreen than a horizontal taskbar. It's especially a stark contrast on my ultrawidescreen home desktop where you just lose so much valuable screen real estate to wide empty expanses of taskbar when horizontal.
(I even appreciate the thought/theory behind the centering they are going for bringing things better into "eye line" on an ultrawide, but with all those wasted pixels around it I could be using to uncramp vertical space in apps, I think they have the right general idea but the very wrong implementation.)
But as far as I remember, even since '95 you could move the taskbar to whichever edge you wanted.
Would not be happy if that no longer became possible.
Or, just don't use windows 11. I certainly won't. I'm only using win10 as it is because they don't care if you use an unauthorized copy for free. At this point my camel's back is a needle away from switching to linux/mac.
Gnome is nice too but suffers from the same lack of configurability. It's too opinionated like Mac. You can make it more flexible but you'll end up having a lot of plugins that end up being hard to maintain across version updates. Every time I'm looking for a function in Gnome and Google it I find an old thread discussing how it used to have it but the Devs removed it because they didn't agree with it or deem it necessary.
In contrast with that the idea of "Options everywhere!" seems to still be the KDE philosophy so if you like choice this is the place to go IMO :)
I'm getting tried of "opinionated" technologies. Everyone has opinions, but it's a dick move to force yours on others like that's a good thing.
If there is a workaround for that I'm onboard... At least until I discover the next blocker.
With their support schedule, you'll probably have to sooner than you think, if you need to keep using Windows.
I'm optimistic that by 2025 either Microsoft or a third party have developed a way to put the taskbar back at the top. It's apparently possible to use the W10 taskbar in W11 with a registry hack, in the current builds.
Fir a time, I ran NX on both Mac OS and Linux. Linux is a tough setup. Mac OS was easier. Both are missing features related to fonts.
Other than that, it reminded me of running high end SDRC on IRIX. :D
Support is either gone or on the serious fade today. Too much integration and momentum.
Also, Steam + gaming works surprisingly well.
I guess what I’m saying is: give it a shot!
Unfortunately, my employer makes me use it at work, so I can't really avoid it.
If they bork it up, it costs other people money, because it costs me time.
I run it mostly standard, bog standard and got really good at the basics. Best overall path.
Maybe they want to force that on everyone?
Whittle it down to the nubs and there is less support overall.
I am happy to do the work, let someone else buy Windows.
I'd be happy with Linux but I never had the time/inclination to ensure my games work there. Win11's taskbar might just get me to find out.
They benefit way more from selling multiple devices for different purposes than they would from selling "THE" ultimate device.
I must have my back turned. Where is this wall? Apple seems to be investing quite heavily into its Mac line-up, including by differentiating it from iOS devices.
Could all of you "professional" software "engineers" out there please just stop sucking so damned hard? You're making me deeply ashamed to be a part of this industry.
Also: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Even with the Windows 8 UX changes, our most senior engineers were up in arms in open protest and they STILL went through with it.
This is a Product led decision.
I've never worked at Microsoft, but have worked at other large software companies. This is 100% a design decision. Engineers like buttons, shortcuts, neat tricks, test tools, secret options, lots of menus, etc.
But even if they had, I don't anyone gets a pass on building a crap product just because they happened to get paid to do so. If your situation is such that you can't risk your job by refusing to do it, you can at least own it and feel an appropriate amount of shame.
Either that or accept co-responsibility.
That being said, removing this feature is a terrible decision and I'm not happy to hear about it.
I have a feeling this is gonna be the big issue for some people. I personally just leave it at the bottom, but there's something to be said that when you have a standard 16:9 monitor, it doesn't make sense to remove that space from the vertical axis when most content is already too wide for that aspect ratio.
It sounds like the most trivial concern, but this is absolutely the level of configuration that makes one contemplate shell or OS replacement.
I'm planning on staying on windows 10 until they pry it from my cold, dead hands. I already had reservations before, but breaking my muscle memory like that is the last straw. Though I suppose I'll have to eventually update when software starts only working on it.
Some users will moan, maybe less than 0.001% will consider moving to a different OS, and things will just continue as it stands. MS knows they have a captive audience with Windows, so they don't have to care what the users want.
In areas where MS does not have a captive audience they are much more competitive and provide much better value.
I would not rule out the possibility that the team that rewrote the taskbar does not include a single person who wrote the original taskbar and now nobody knows how to get drag and drop to work reliably with all formats.
2. I vaguely recall a patent issue in the 2000s around this issue. At the time, lots of drag-and-drop actions resulted in explicit error messages indicating Microsoft knew what the user wanted to do but that it wasn't able to respond as the user intended. I quickly searched for the patent but could not find it.
You make it sound like this is somehow crazy complex behavior that no one would have implemented, but this is table stakes for a Windows application as otherwise double-clicking files that are supposed to open in your program wouldn't work.
Task bar items don't represent exe files, they represent windows spawned by process started from exe files. Excel has many different behaviors depending on how you open a file. In fact, you can get excel into a state where double clicking a file opens in a hidden instance of excel that you can never see.
If you drag a file to a notepad window taskbar item, should it open in that window? should it open a new window in that process? Should it start a new process with that file? Should users have control over how that happens or should application developers? Or both? Or Microsoft?
On macos, theres only ever one instance of an application open so these questions are easy answer. On windows, they arent.
Besides, windows has had the best vertical taskbar implementation from all DEs since 95.
That's the downside to force-feeding telemetry to everybody without respecting individual user preferences. Some people won't like that, and will find workarounds to disable it. While those clearly aren't the users you need to pay the most attention to, they are among the users that you least want to ignore or disenfranchise.
The irony being that if telemetry had been voluntary, most of us would never have bothered turning it off.
I honestly thought this wasn't true because it never worked when I tried it. Is the third party support for this feature just really lacking compared to macOS where it seems universal?
As far as I can tell, no programs support that. Every one I've tried pins the document instead, so I'm wondering if they're mistaken. It does work on KDE.
A good (only?) workaround is using alt tab but if you have many open programs it can be quite annoying.
The bottom rows has the currently open applications with the begining of the window title directly visible, the top row has a list of small icons for shortcuts to often used programs (maybe thirty or so).
I find this incredibly more productive than the redesigned taskbar with its huge square buttons and mixing of shortcuts and current windows.
For what it's worth, Windows 11 supports none of these things, which is incredibly frustrating. I have the icons set small, which is good because the taskbar is smaller - but you cannot have two rows, nor can you have titlebar text available on the buttons "long-form style" as was an option in Windows 10.
Additionally, there is no way to ungroup items like Win10 had, so you have only one button per application rather than per window, as I would prefer.
I wouldn't mind it so much if it wasn't for the fact that Windows 10 always refers me to the less functional (but prettier) sound control panel when I search for "sound". If I want to actually get to the settings I want, I have to dig through things to find the "old" windows sound control panel. It is antiquated, but still holds all the functionality I need.
I do feel their pain, though. They want to make things simple for the average user, but still cater to the power user. It's a very difficult line to straddle, and I think they end up upsetting both groups of users.
I have really come to love OSX. It just works. It's secure. It's easy to use. The UI is simple and consistent, but I can still get to the power user settings very easily.
Pretty much the only thing I use my Windows computer for anymore is crypto mining and gaming.
Microsoft really has a lock on the good-bad-good cadence.
I agree that win8 set a low bar, but so did vista, fact is 7 was much better and 10 follows that same progression.
If you do it too much, users willing to give feedback will have less energy and nuance left for the really smart stuff, as they dig their heels in to fight hard for the simple things.
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker-and-a-first-look-at...
Sure it was a complex menu but it was so feature rich.
Maybe they should just eliminate the mouse.
Source: I just did all of this in the current Windows 11 Insider release as part of testing an upcoming PortableApps.com Platform release.
So, you can still pin just about anything to the taskbar, it's just a more convoluted way of doing it than dragging. And, I'd wager, we'll have third party utilities that will automate the above for folks who like to pin random items regularly. Heck, I may do it myself and stick it on github if people would like.
7+ Taskbar Tweaker lets you do this in Windows 10, even breaking out of window groups. XFCE lets you do it out of the box. XFCE does also let you drag files to the taskbar item to activate that window, which I do occasionally. I already switched to Manjaro everywhere for work though, so Microsoft can do whatever they want. Windows machines are just for games and watching streams in my house.
After I started using Linux with Gnome, I realized how much less strain I was putting on my wrists with the taskbar/launcher and window controls on the left. Since as a right-handed person, it, the angle of my wrist is at a much more comfortable angle, about 45 degrees facing inward. It's way more natural to do a side to side swiping motion with your forearm than a jerky up and down motion when the taskbar is in the default bottom position and you're switching between windows all day.
I only use Windows at work now but if they haven't added this back by the time we have to upgrade to Windows 11, it'll only be a matter of time before I start getting carpal tunnel symptoms again.
I bet there are others that have limited arm mobility that also rely on this customization that will be even more harmed by this.
Most common example is to keep ".jpg" default for the faster, normal case and drag the file to photoshop if I absolutely have to.
Hoping the myriad of public/private services I rely upon will have dropped the "Internet Explorer 11/Windows" requirement that keeps a single Windows PC lingering on my home network.
