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
#2Amazing, 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??
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#3Amazing, 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 don’t know if they actually changed this but the Windows 10 Start Menu is a fragile bricolage of applets and plugins that breaks all the time which is just not suitable for such an important part.
I’d throw it out and rebuild it to make it reliable and defensive against broken applets.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#4Never Combine and Only Combine when Full. Two missing features that were literally keeping me from upgrading to 11.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#5Never 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 individual window access after hove. Actually turned off the TPM on my PC to prevent Windows update from pulling another one of those "forced upgrades" like they did for win10. Perhaps when this is out I will finally be OK with "upgrading" (hopefully the first-party ads also continue to be disable-able, that is)
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#6Amazing, 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 feedback to revert this.
Even though I'm happy (this was also a dealbreaker for me, even though you could hack the old taskbar via dll-s) I think this shows how much in a deadlock Windows OS development is. Almost all of the recent changes are surface-level, on one side you have employees disconnected from the core user base, on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#7Amazing, 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 wonder if it was a technical issue, or an internal UI debate over trying force a more Mac-like look. (Don't Microsoft's UI designers use Macs?)
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#8Never 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).
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#9Until Microsoft introduces "Never Combine App Icons" to Windows 11, you can use this little enhancement to do it: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#10Amazing, 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…
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 :-)