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Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

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Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#161
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It added a lot more stability over win8 and removed a bunch of terrible UX. Additionally it added to a lot of the great ideas of windows 7. I can’t recall any off the top of my head, but I remember trying to do things in 7 and being surprised they weren’t possible. I agree that win8 set a low bar, but so did vista, fact is 7 was much better and 10 follows that same progression.

Still tries to force cortana on me despite my computer not even having a mic. It places ads in the start menu. Heck, the start menu is basically completely useless. I've resorted to relying exclusively on search now, which means my start menu is a mess and if I can't remember the name of the app, I have to resort to using file explorer to attempt to locate it. I still can't for the life of me figure out how to change…

> I've resorted to relying exclusively on search now

I'm surprised you're even able to make use of the search because that's also horrible and loves to swap out the result you wanted last second so you open up something else random. It's also incredibly slow and tries to hamfist bing search results and stupid suggestions to install apps instead of just searching your computer.

Now I use Everything (voidtools). And I put it as the first pinned item in my taskbar so I can do Win+1 to access it quickly.

Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ne…

I think it's so common now because Apple has become so popular and trendsetting. Apple have always been very opinionated but they've steered the industry along with them. Everyone follows them in some way, like when vista basically copied Aqua and when they moved to flat design everyone followed. Opinionated software works for simple apps but not for whole OSes IMO. I'm glad there's still systems around that offer mo…

Ironically, OSX lets you move the dock to left/right of the screen

Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#163

This was genuinely one of the more intuitive parts of the task bar. Although I'm aware that you can pin applications to the task bar by right clicking. I surely hope they give alternative ways to pin stuff. 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,…

I've used a right-side taskbar since Windows XP, so yeah I've been feeling pretty angry about this.

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.)

Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#164
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used the task bar this way. (Along the left vertically) it matches how I use macOS which has the dock along the left.

Can I ask why? Just why MS, who asked for this? Was this really a feature people were complaining about? Really????? Why remove this feature? What logic is this? Trying to imitate apple os?

Best guess: someone or some group wanted to rewrite the Taskbar "from scratch" because of "all the tech debt crud making it a tough codebase to work in" and well a lot of that "tech debt" was all the stuff that made it customizable and supported drag-and-drop and all sorts of other things that users use every day but makes for a complicated codebase.

Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#165
post #8

The lack of vertical taskbar is so mind bogglingly stupid, I don't know what to say.

What? If that's true, they've gone completely insane. I know non 16:9 panels have been making a resurgence but most panels will be portrait for a while. Besides, windows has had the best vertical taskbar implementation from all DEs since 95.

It seems to be true. It's mentioned in the article and one of the things Insiders with hardware that supports 11 are currently complaining about. The new taskbar can't be moved to any other position than the bottom for the first time since Windows 95. As a right side taskbar user since before even the age of 16:9 panels but who especially appreciates vertical taskbars in the age of 21:9+ ultrawides, everything about this loss of such an old feature boggles my mind (and makes me angry).

Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#166

Having the taskbar at bottom of wide screen is waste of the valuable height! Where can I give Microsoft feedback without the Feedback Hub app?

Fwiw, you don't need to be an Insider to install Feedback Hub. Just search for it in the Store. Now would probably be a great time for even non-Insiders to download it and pile on votes for stuff like this.

Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's so common now because Apple has become so popular and trendsetting. Apple have always been very opinionated but they've steered the industry along with them. Everyone follows them in some way, like when vista basically copied Aqua and when they moved to flat design everyone followed. Opinionated software works for simple apps but not for whole OSes IMO. I'm glad there's still systems around that offer mo…

Ironically, OSX lets you move the dock to left/right of the screen

True but not gladly :) It reverts to a much simpler view (at least it did last time I tried it)

Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#168
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person you're responding to has changed the defaults. 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 Win…

> The person you're responding to has changed the defaults. Hm. Are you sure? Their description of the different behaviour of the top and bottom rows doesn't sound possible, so I assumed their taskbar was a third party one or used third party extension that adds features. The Windows 11 Taskbar sounds pretty bad from your description.

> The Windows 11 Taskbar sounds pretty bad from your description.

Yes, this is exactly what all the complaints are about in this thread: all of the customization supported by the Taskbar since Windows 95 has disappeared in Windows 11 Insider Builds. It only supports the bottom of the screen. It no longer supports drag and drop (what the article here is specifically complaining about). It doesn't support "Quick Launch" and most other "additional toolbars". (That admittedly haven't been well supported since XP anyway, but that's not particularly here nor there.) It sounds like a complete rewrite where they didn't bother to implement even a third of the old features.

Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#169

This was genuinely one of the more intuitive parts of the task bar. Although I'm aware that you can pin applications to the task bar by right clicking. I surely hope they give alternative ways to pin stuff. 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,…

Everyone says they don't want to switch to Linux because they don't want to learn a new UI. That's why you do it once so you're not forced to with the next Windows update. I'm typing this on a machine with the same WM config I had on my first laptop 17 years ago.

Re: Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

#170
post #58
post #46

It reminds me during the last win10 update they added that stupid weather widget on the task bar.

Best part is, that “feature” doesn’t exist in windows 11, they rolled that out knowing it would be gone in 6 months. Someone in marketing needed their win.

Arguably they added that "feature" as a "preview" for 11's new take on Vista's (rarely used) Widgets panel (that moves Live Tiles from a place they are useful if configured right and get increasingly rare developer support to a place that pretty much guarantees their death), as all the junk in the Widgets panel that's not the dying Live Tiles seems to be the same junk news stuff in the annoying 10 "weather popup".
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