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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

#81

Post by kitsunesoba »

coldpie wrote: post #68
Algent wrote: 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 16:10 strikes a nice balance, particularly on laptop displays. It's wide enough to handle a couple of side-by-side windows well without feeling particularly starved for vertical pixels.

For large monitors though (27"+) the need for width is reduced… I've never used a 4:3 or 5:4 monitor that large but I don't think it'd bother me nearly as much as those aspect ratios at small sizes do.

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

#82

Post by wvenable »

mschuster91 wrote: post #26
logifail wrote: post #19

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.

That's a bit of a re-write of history. Mac OS tried to throw away all backwards compatibly on day one but major software vendors told them to pound sand so they had to spend another year building out Carbon. Not to mention that Mac OS X itself is built on NextSTEP.

Linux breaks front-end compatibility so much that never seem to make much progress on stability.

> on top of that, technical baggage keeps holding back Microsoft as well. Apple ditched Intel long ago and now reaps the reward

It's not technical baggage that is the problem. It's strategic issue. Microsoft had a fully functional build of Windows 7 for ARM a long time ago. The problem is they never just released an ARM version of their OS and let developers port their code to it. It was always paired with a new API, the windows store, a locked down version of the OS, etc, etc. This might be specifically to avoid pissing off their hardware partners.

Windows NT was always multi-platform and they always made sure it would build and run on non-Intel CPUs. It has never been a technical issue.

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

#83

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

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

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

#85

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

mangecoeur wrote: post #2

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??

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.

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

#86

Post by brundolf »

mangecoeur wrote: post #2

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??

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

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

#87

Post by gruez »

notarget137 wrote: post #62
simula67 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can solve this problem with branding. Have a "Windows OS Bleeding Edge" brand that changes regularly. Have "Windows OS LTS" brand that changes less often.

They have tried exactly that with Windows 10 LTSC. And killed it off quite qucikly.

>And killed it off quite qucikly.

Evidently not, considering there were 4 such releases. The earliest was on July 29, 2015, and the latest was on November 16, 2021 and will be supported until January 13, 2032.

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

#88

Post by LoganDark »

mangecoeur wrote: post #2

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??

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

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

#89

Post by pphysch »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #83

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

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.

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

#90

Post by w0m »

mangecoeur wrote: post #2

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??

> had to completely scrap it and start from zero

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?

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