Amazing, only 2 years to implement a feature you had already. What was so problematic about the Windows 10 taskbar that they had to completely scrap it and start from zero??
Guess: Designer-minded Windows execs were hell-bent on moving to a macOS-like taskbar for years. Height, item count and behaviour is massively different wether you simply have icons or "legacy" long rectangles with text. They successfully persuaded engineering to not have this big UX gap for such a crucial part of the interface so they axed labels. Now after 1.5 years and lackluster adoption they got enough bad feedback to revert this.
Even though I'm happy (this was also a dealbreaker for me, even though you could hack the old taskbar via dll-s) I think this shows how much in a deadlock Windows OS development is. Almost all of the recent changes are surface-level, on one side you have employees disconnected from the core user base, on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility.
> on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility
Ah, those users. Users who want their OS to stay firmly in the background and let them get on with their jobs, and who aren't actually that bothered about "feature" upgrades every month or three.
Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product.
I've been using valinet/ExplorerPatcher on Win11 for a bit just to bring back all the old Win10 taskbar stuff. I know we should even need this, but I hope this is helpful.
Well, they didn't scrap it and start from zero... at least the labels were already disabled in Windows 7 by default, and more than 10 years later they thought it would be safe to remove them completely, but looks like they were wrong. Personally, the Windows 7-style task bar (icons only and combining quick launch icons with the task bar) was one of the few innovations (yeah, I know it was heavily inspired by MacOS) that I actually liked about newer Windows versions. I even carried it over to KDE by using the "Icons-only task manager".
They had a huge failure with Surface Neo and the OS (and the taskbar/start menu) they were making for it Windows 10x. After Neo was cancelled they tried to retool 10x for ordinary laptops. After that failed they took the crappy start/taskbar meant for dual screen/one app per screen devices, slapped it on top of latest insider version of Windows 10, introduced arbitrary cpu cutoff (so essentially screwing a large part of Windows insiders) and called it Windows 11.
There's some truth to this -- it's 100% the taskbar from 10X, but there's a lot of other changes for 11 (settings, taskbar stuff like volume controller, file explorer). Secondary goal was probably to decouple/undock the taskbar from the main OS which would require rebuilding some parts.
It's the Microsoft way. They have this strange duality of always redesigning UIs(see literally every major version of Windows) but also being obsessive about backwards compatibility, so all the cruft and even UIs of previous iterations are all buried in there somehow.
As a result modern Windows feels like a graveyard of old ideas and various phases of whatever UI seemed trendy at the time.
I don’t know if they actually changed this but the Windows 10 Start Menu is a fragile bricolage of applets and plugins that breaks all the time which is just not suitable for such an important part.
I’d throw it out and rebuild it to make it reliable and defensive against broken applets.
That's something I was genuinely wondering, how bad was the win10 task bar codebase because as i understand it the win11 is a completely new program so they have to keep reimplementing features they already had.
In this case it's a good thing. I used to use a piece of software called ExplorerPatcher but, as with nearly all patchers, it has the possibility to break after an update, as it did, causing Explorer to get stuck in a crash loop while I tried to figure out how to uninstall the thing without any access to the file explorer (or the start menu to find anything else to run). I didn't remember Control Panel was control.exe.
I managed to do it by downloading the setup with wget and executing it with an uninstall flag, but that was really scary.
Glad I'll get taskbar labels and clock seconds back soon. <3
I'm remember the exact same thing on Windows 8, and having to install Classic Start, which emulated the windows 7 taskbar/menu. Every couple of years they go all "Lawnmower Man", nobody wants it, and they go back to the boring thing that everybody was happy with.
I'm using a bleeding-edge OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE and I've configured the taskbar and menu to pretty much the same think I have been using for over 10 years or more.
No one besides WinDev cares anylonger about WinRT/WinUI, so WinDev has starting to re-implement the Windows shell in WinUI to prove that they still care about WinRT and WinUI.
The 2 years delay shows how resource constrained the whole WinUI team is, and how far they are to reach feature parity with UWP, or raw Win32.
Plus the team behind Windows 10X had to do something (that is how Windows 11 came to be).
Charitably: sometimes you just have to rebuild something. Tech debt, design debt, whatever else. I don't know if they "had to" in this case, but it's plausible
It certainly was a choice to ship it in a state where it was missing so many basic features, but as expected, they're gradually getting re-implemented
The taskbar wasn't just the "Windows 10 taskbar". It's pretty much had code left over from Win95 and just was continually built on top of. It desperately needed a rewrite from scratch.
I only use ~any UI to launch a terminal, so I'm clearly not qualified to defend/defame anything. But you have to start over at some point. Was Win10 a clean slate implementation?
Coming here to say this too. Having each window correspond to a button on the task bar is crucial for my workflow as I use individual windows as one layer of grouping for the eventual tabs in those windows.
(Not supporting ungrouped one-click dock access to individual windows is one of the reasons I dislike using Mac OS...)
I was massively disappointed that Win 11 removed this as it made it so annoying to only have individual window access after hove. Actually turned off the TPM on my PC to prevent Windows update from pulling another one of those "forced upgrades" like they did for win10. Perhaps when this is out I will finally be OK with "upgrading" (hopefully the first-party ads also continue to be disable-able, that is)
A huge portion of "applications" I use on my computer happen to run in a web browser. And I mean this as a distinct activity from "browsing the web" (which might be something like HN or researching a topic or shopping).
All the browsers have the ability to open both windows and tabs. If I wanted stuff grouped in one taskbar item, I'd open a tab. If I've specifically opened a new window, I am specifically saying I don't want those grouped -- the OS applying its own grouping is obnoxious.
If all the apps I use had native executables, they'd appear as their own taskbar icon. If they were wrapped in an Electron app, I'd have essentially the same user experience but they'd get their own icon.
My point is really that combining windows/processes that happen to be hosted by the same executable is silly -- even as a highly technical user I don't care about that detail. I'm doing a semantically different activity; I specifically opened a new window; I want a dedicated taskbar icon for it.
I'd be curious: if "Always combine" wasn't actually the default, how many users would specifically turn it on? 50%? 5%? A fraction of 1%?
That reminds me of the feature that windows 11 finally broke that I’ve loved since windows 98: quick launch toolbars.
You could put shortcuts in a folder somewhere, and them to the task bar as a quick launch toolbar. This would show each shortcut as a single-click launcher showing a small mini icon. You could then give the toolbar a name, and shrink it so every icon is hidden, which effectively turned it into a named menu.
I’d put all my game shortcuts in a folder, add it as a quick launch toolbar called “Games”, and it would basically give me a global menu to run a game whenever I wanted with 2 clicks.
I used this feature all the way from Windows 98 to Windows 10, until they finally broke it for no good reason in Windows 11.
Also compact size for bar and more customizable start menu. I don't need to waste a space by recommended files and also compact shortcuts would make my start menu more efficient.
Vertical has always been much wider than the horizontal layout is tall, at least when using the small taskbar icons setting. However the third-party utility 7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows narrower vertical taskbars, which actually makes the vertical orientation ideal if placed on the left-hand side (the least interacted with edge of a desktop, ie: less likely to be accidentally interacted with).
UI designer really needs to avoid pushing tall horizontal bars. Often a website takes up more 1/3 of the vertical screen space with FIXED bars. No I don’t care to stare at your search bar. Not everyone works on a big desktop monitor.
Taskbar program icon overlay icons (such as red/green/yellow status indicators for Skype and other IM programs, or the New Mail symbol for Outlook) are only visible in Large Taskbar mode - in Small Icons mode the overlays are entirely hidden. Those overlays do convey useful information, it's a shame MS couldn't find a way to make them work in Small Icons mode.
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Personally I can't stand Large Icon mode in Windows 10 because in Windows 10 it takes the 32x32 icons then downscales them to 24x24, even if there's a 24x24 icon available (whereas Windows 7 and 8 always used the 32x32 icons). I will agree that 24x24 sized icons seem to visually fit better in the Taskbar but the crazy part is that Windows 10 always downscales the 32x32 icons which makes them look slightly blurry: it never uses 24x24 icons if they're available, which lead to Google Chrome's icon designers having to compromise the Chrome logo icon so it would look better when downscaled: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=526622... (see comment 16 and 26)
It'd be nice if it'd use the best resolution available but the Chrome icon needed to be fixed regardless. Windows doesn't guarantee a quantized DPI so the icon is always going to need to scale.
Indeed. I have been using Explorer Patcher only for the single reason that I don't need or want a big tall taskbar. I was fine with my "small icon" taskbar from Windows 10.
And then some whoever said "We need a brand new taskbar because our code is too complicated and it's hard to maintain! Those people who preferred the smaller taskbar? It's their loss. We can't afford the development time to support that legacy feature in our complete rewrite!"
Microsoft is not what it used to be.. now unbloat all the stuff and remove useless services.. they are about to miss on the Handheld console revolution.. crazy when you think about it, they own windows yet they let it rot, just open source it at this point
They could have owned the handheld console market if they had just repeated what Sega and Sony did.
Basically: When the next gen comes out, use the latest tech to miniaturize and make portable the previous gen.
Gamegear for the most part was a Sega Master System. The PSP for the most part was a Playstation 1. Both were released during a time where there was too many limitations to really fully utilize that prior catalog (see: GameGear SMS converter, which was HUGE, limited memory for downloading games onto PSP, no legal path for importing your PS1 library into the PSP from physical disks).
Imagine the market share Microsoft would have if they made an Xbox One or before that Xbox 360 portable, which could play your existing library using cloud saves.
Do like what Apple did for the 1st iPhone, cheap entry price with a 2 year Game Pass contract (or do like Valve and the steam deck, sell it at a loss, gamepass is the long term goal anyways), and eat the entire market share..
Windows, that's literally the biggest advantage they have over both Sony and Nintendo, yet they don't use it..
.. a giant library that spans decades
Software must follow to ensure proper UX, it's not there yet.. so they have double the amount of work to do..
OTOH it's great being a Developer (3x). It's weird being a heavy MS user (VSCode, WSL, Copilot, DX, playwright, etc.) and not even thinking about Windows OS or Office.
"Azure OS" is what matters now, so outside server workloads for Azure, WinDev seems to be left with newly graduated interns without any background on the "Developers, Developers, Developers" days.
If you miss those days, XBox and Azure business lines are the ones that matter nowadays.
I hope they are also going to add support for left/top alignment of the icons (the classic way), for removal of left&right margins in centered alignment (Mac way) so places to the left and right of the icons would be free screen space rather than empty panel area, good support for horizontal panel placing, turn system icons (unmount device, network indicators, sound volume&output control, keyboard layout indicator, clock and calemdar etc) into first-class panel icons rather than tray icons (they just look ugly in case of horizontal panel placement).
Fix: I meant good support for vertical panel placing. Horizontal obviously has always been reasonably good. Vertical has always been more or less ugly and I am not sure if it is supported in Windows 11 at all.
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Even though I'm happy (this was also a dealbreaker for me, even though you could hack the old taskbar via dll-s) I think this shows how much in a deadlock Windows OS development is. Almost all of the recent changes are surface-level, on one side you have employees disconnected from the core user base, on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility.
Ah, those users. Users who want their OS to stay firmly in the background and let them get on with their jobs, and who aren't actually that bothered about "feature" upgrades every month or three.
Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product.
Now…. When will they bring back the ability to park your taskbar vertically on the left hand side? Another 2 years?
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues
And literally every Windows user I personally know has turned them back on.
As a result modern Windows feels like a graveyard of old ideas and various phases of whatever UI seemed trendy at the time.
Why stop there? Lets go back to the Windows 7 Taskbar. I remember that being better than Windows 10.
I’d throw it out and rebuild it to make it reliable and defensive against broken applets.
I managed to do it by downloading the setup with wget and executing it with an uninstall flag, but that was really scary.
Glad I'll get taskbar labels and clock seconds back soon. <3
I'm using a bleeding-edge OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE and I've configured the taskbar and menu to pretty much the same think I have been using for over 10 years or more.
The 2 years delay shows how resource constrained the whole WinUI team is, and how far they are to reach feature parity with UWP, or raw Win32.
Plus the team behind Windows 10X had to do something (that is how Windows 11 came to be).
It certainly was a choice to ship it in a state where it was missing so many basic features, but as expected, they're gradually getting re-implemented
I only use ~any UI to launch a terminal, so I'm clearly not qualified to defend/defame anything. But you have to start over at some point. Was Win10 a clean slate implementation?
(Not supporting ungrouped one-click dock access to individual windows is one of the reasons I dislike using Mac OS...)
I was massively disappointed that Win 11 removed this as it made it so annoying to only have individual window access after hove. Actually turned off the TPM on my PC to prevent Windows update from pulling another one of those "forced upgrades" like they did for win10. Perhaps when this is out I will finally be OK with "upgrading" (hopefully the first-party ads also continue to be disable-able, that is)
Deleted Comment
All the browsers have the ability to open both windows and tabs. If I wanted stuff grouped in one taskbar item, I'd open a tab. If I've specifically opened a new window, I am specifically saying I don't want those grouped -- the OS applying its own grouping is obnoxious.
If all the apps I use had native executables, they'd appear as their own taskbar icon. If they were wrapped in an Electron app, I'd have essentially the same user experience but they'd get their own icon.
My point is really that combining windows/processes that happen to be hosted by the same executable is silly -- even as a highly technical user I don't care about that detail. I'm doing a semantically different activity; I specifically opened a new window; I want a dedicated taskbar icon for it.
I'd be curious: if "Always combine" wasn't actually the default, how many users would specifically turn it on? 50%? 5%? A fraction of 1%?
With a vertical Taskbar this is the only option, in my case.
You could put shortcuts in a folder somewhere, and them to the task bar as a quick launch toolbar. This would show each shortcut as a single-click launcher showing a small mini icon. You could then give the toolbar a name, and shrink it so every icon is hidden, which effectively turned it into a named menu.
I’d put all my game shortcuts in a folder, add it as a quick launch toolbar called “Games”, and it would basically give me a global menu to run a game whenever I wanted with 2 clicks.
I used this feature all the way from Windows 98 to Windows 10, until they finally broke it for no good reason in Windows 11.
Start menu in Win11 is dumbier.
Also, there's typically plenty of spare width and not much spare height, due to modern aspect ratios, so it's a win, anyway.
Also also, if you do the maths, the typical vertical taskbar can be significantly thicker and use no more screen area.
[0]: https://www.startallback.com/
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Personally I can't stand Large Icon mode in Windows 10 because in Windows 10 it takes the 32x32 icons then downscales them to 24x24, even if there's a 24x24 icon available (whereas Windows 7 and 8 always used the 32x32 icons). I will agree that 24x24 sized icons seem to visually fit better in the Taskbar but the crazy part is that Windows 10 always downscales the 32x32 icons which makes them look slightly blurry: it never uses 24x24 icons if they're available, which lead to Google Chrome's icon designers having to compromise the Chrome logo icon so it would look better when downscaled: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=526622... (see comment 16 and 26)
And then some whoever said "We need a brand new taskbar because our code is too complicated and it's hard to maintain! Those people who preferred the smaller taskbar? It's their loss. We can't afford the development time to support that legacy feature in our complete rewrite!"
Basically: When the next gen comes out, use the latest tech to miniaturize and make portable the previous gen.
Gamegear for the most part was a Sega Master System. The PSP for the most part was a Playstation 1. Both were released during a time where there was too many limitations to really fully utilize that prior catalog (see: GameGear SMS converter, which was HUGE, limited memory for downloading games onto PSP, no legal path for importing your PS1 library into the PSP from physical disks).
Imagine the market share Microsoft would have if they made an Xbox One or before that Xbox 360 portable, which could play your existing library using cloud saves.
This for example should have been a microsoft product:
https://gpd.hk/gpdwin4
Do like what Apple did for the 1st iPhone, cheap entry price with a 2 year Game Pass contract (or do like Valve and the steam deck, sell it at a loss, gamepass is the long term goal anyways), and eat the entire market share..
Windows, that's literally the biggest advantage they have over both Sony and Nintendo, yet they don't use it..
.. a giant library that spans decades
Software must follow to ensure proper UX, it's not there yet.. so they have double the amount of work to do..
If you miss those days, XBox and Azure business lines are the ones that matter nowadays.