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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

#71
post #68
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the 16/10 era of monitors so much. I saw it advertised as a feature in some recent laptop.

I miss 3:4. Don't know why everyone loves these stupidly wide monitors. Modern displays have fewer vertical pixels than my damn 2002-era CRT did.

I think you mean 4:3

Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow clap for windows 11 taskbar! Now…. When will they bring back the ability to park your taskbar vertically on the left hand side? Another 2 years?

Using startallback for this, no excuse for Microsoft but it seriously improved my windows 11 experience.

+1 for startallback I just paid them $5 this morning and I couldn't be happier. I am able to have my taskbars exactly how I want them. The productivity gain has paid for itself many times over.

Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> win11 is a completely new program It’s barely a UI skin! It’s not even complete or self-consistent, and the original Win10 skin is still there under it, feature-complete. People noticed that certain boot failures of Win 11 bring back the original Win 10 look! It’s basically a “Mac mod” for Windows made by a bunch of Apple users working within Microsoft.

Ironically, one of the qualities of the Mac is the consistency of the interface styling and UX irrespective of how specifically the task bar works, while Microsoft just keep adding layer on top of layer so that depending on which bit of the system you are in you get UI styles ranging from win11 through win2000 (plus, if you dig, a whole bunch of pixel art icons from win98).

The Win 3.0 folder selection dialog is still around.

Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons

#74

There is an important change here compared to "classical" Windows, labeled taskbar item widths are now flexible. I really welcome this, others might not.

> I really welcome this, others might not.

Basically any change to Windows these days.

Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product. The curse of products that are - in their foundations - over thirty years old and used by billions of people. To expand: - any time Microsoft does fundamental changes to the look and feel or to management/configuration, enterprise users (the kind that buys tens of thousands of licenses at a time,…

> - at the same time, desktop Linux distributions and macOS keep iterating and innovating without having that burden. Linux userland generally doesn't care a bit about backwards compatibility,...

Well yeah, and we still don't see Linux on every corner (android excluded). Linux desktop is a joke. You can either pick DE whick breaks compatibility every now and then (Gnome, KDE, ...) or which has more or less stopped developing (Xfce). I understand, it is nicer developing new things than maintaining and evolving old codebases, but I don't think MS needs to worry about Linux in this segment. And I'm saying that as someone who actually prefers any Linux flavor to Windows.

Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons

#76
post #4

Never 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).

Even if they let me sidemount the taskbar in w11 I will stick with SAB for the hack that lets me make it extra thin.

Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons

#77
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product. The curse of products that are - in their foundations - over thirty years old and used by billions of people. To expand: - any time Microsoft does fundamental changes to the look and feel or to management/configuration, enterprise users (the kind that buys tens of thousands of licenses at a time,…

> if MS breaks too much or forgets to add compatibility modes/quirks, said enterprise customers are going to be pretty pissed because that can sometimes mean they have to buy new machines costing many millions of dollars The obvious solution is to leave those enterprise customers behind on the legacy edition of Windows and launching something new. But Microsoft seems incapable of going to market with something new al…

It's strange that MS has never did what Apple did with the OS 9 → OS X transition, starting with a fresh foundation and making a clean break from the predecessor by way of a well-integrated "Classic" mode that seamlessly runs legacy applications in a "borderless" VM.

The most natural time to have done this would've probably been going from XP → Vista/7, which broke a number of old things anyway.

For all that switching mainline Windows over to the NT kernel in 2k/XP improved Windows, the benefit wasn't as great as it could've been if they'd been able to unshackle the OS from backwards compatibility with all the preceding Windows/DOS stuff.

Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons

#78

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??

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…

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.

Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks, I was thinking of exactly this post so it's useful you shared it!

Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons

#80
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The problem with pleasing old costumers is that you might fail to gain new customers. Microsoft is mostly conservative with its OS, while Apple is not afraid to cut off features it consideres outdated. And the MacOS market share has increased strongly over the last ~20 years.

The problem with Microsoft always looking to their competition for ideas is the fail to capitalize on their own strengths. They end up chasing Mac OS or Android and create a product that isn't as good as either of those (because chasing the competition is hard) while subsequently throwing away what made their own product competitive and interesting.

Windows should not be a Mac OS clone. But every single UI update sends it in that direction.

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