Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 166 posts

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

#131

Post by wvenable »

908B64B197 wrote: post #116
wvenable wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sen…

Windows should clone one particular release of OS X: Snow Leopard. It was marketed as a "Zero New Features" update [0]. Only performance, reliability and back-end upgrades (and it was a packed release for sure that completed the 64 bit transition). EDIT: Anyone who agrees, upvote this comment! Who knows maybe someone in Redmond will see it! You never know! [0] https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/26/apple-work-looking-back-at…

The most popular versions of Windows -- 7 and 10 -- are both pretty low-feature releases. Windows 7 was just the completed version of Vista. Windows 10 was a bit of rollback of some of the worst UI ideas in 8. Neither were radical departures from the version before.

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

#132

Post by ww520 »

AstralStorm wrote: post #13

Still no vertical taskbar. Horizontal is a waste of precious screen estate.

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.

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

#133

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

RajT88 wrote: post #100
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

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 cata…

I totally agree with you!

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..

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

#134

Post by wruza »

cubefox wrote: post #29
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.

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 pleasing new costumers is that you might fail to gain old customers.

In case MS marketing reads this thread: you can simply fix the outstanding, sore-thumb problems with your product in its own way and gain both types of customers. Instead of poorly mimicking something they never wanted in the first place.

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

#135

Post by wruza »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #70
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.

Or just have two Desktop Environments. One for the hoi polloi where the designers can go wild and the bean counters can push MSN "news", and one for Enterprise/Professionals that is more or less "Classic".

Only very rich corporations like FOSS community can simultaneously support two DEs (especially when one of them never changes too much). Microsoft has neither budget nor enough staff for that.

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

#136

Post by nirav72 »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #70
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.

Or just have two Desktop Environments. One for the hoi polloi where the designers can go wild and the bean counters can push MSN "news", and one for Enterprise/Professionals that is more or less "Classic".

> Enterprise/Professionals that is more or less "Classic".

Yes - I’ve been wondering since win10 why Microsoft thinks the enterprise edition needs an xbox app preinstalled.

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

#137

Post by raffraffraff »

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??

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.

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

#138

Post by wvenable »

vetinari wrote: post #122
wvenable wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

MacOS breaks compatibility much faster than Linux. New features or APIs in MacOS are adopted much faster than in Linux world, too (see also: Wayland. Or, on similar complexity level, global dark mode).

"Linux" is harder to define. Are we talking about the kernel, the console user-land, desktop environment?

My most recent experience with this was updating the Raspberry Pi OS -- the latest version completely breaks RetroPi and I had to reinstall and revert.

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

#139

Post by danielrpa »

ChancyChance wrote: post #50
danielrpa wrote: post #34

YES! Thank you for focusing on productivity instead of copying Apple's obsolete UI.

I know you’re trolling, but it’s funny that the CLI is the most productive UI and it is literally ancient/obsolete in computer time yet it persists. New != better.

I'm actually not trolling. I find Apple's UI legitimately unproductive, a mix of 80s, 90s and 2000s thinking that didn't survive the test of time. Window's older taskbar is vastly superior, as the CLI, both examples of UIs that got it right.

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

#140

Post by ninkendo »

whyoh wrote: post #37
Eldandan wrote: post #4

Never Combine and Only Combine when Full. Two missing features that were literally keeping me from upgrading to 11.

I hope "Use small taskbar buttons" is back too. The default taskbar takes too much vertical space.

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.

Post reply on HN