There is an important change here compared to "classical" Windows, labeled taskbar item widths are now flexible. I really welcome this, others might not.
Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
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Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 feedb…
I'm curious who makes the decisions... who has final say -- designers or engineering or PMs or execs? (So I'll know who to blame :-)
This sheds some light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#13Still no vertical taskbar. Horizontal is a waste of precious screen estate.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#14Still no vertical taskbar. Horizontal is a waste of precious screen estate.
If you are willing to use a commercial (though cheap with $5) app, I use StartAllBack [0] for this.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#15Never Combine and Only Combine when Full. Two missing features that were literally keeping me from upgrading to 11.
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 i…
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Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#16Still no vertical taskbar. Horizontal is a waste of precious screen estate.
I miss the 16/10 era of monitors so much. I saw it advertised as a feature in some recent laptop.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#17Still no vertical taskbar. Horizontal is a waste of precious screen estate.
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).
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#18Never Combine and Only Combine when Full. Two missing features that were literally keeping me from upgrading to 11.
I quite literally paid for a third-party app (StartAllBack) to do this for me (amongst other things).
I'm glad I found about this small App a while back. Super useful and incredibly cheap for the amount of small issues it solves.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#19Amazing, 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 feedb…
> 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.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#20Amazing, 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??
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".