vertical/top taskbar for another couple year I suppose.. I'm glad I finally cut all the tie to Windows.
Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
21–30 of 166 posts
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#22Still 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).
My monitor is 32:9, I don't care how wide the vertical taskbar is.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#23Amazing, 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.
That's something I was genuinely wondering, how bad was the win10 task bar codebase because as i understand it the win11 is a completely new program so they have to keep reimplementing features they already had.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#24Small taskbar still missing. It makes no sense having such a large taskbar (in terms of height).
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's something I was genuinely wondering, how bad was the win10 task bar codebase because as i understand it the win11 is a completely new program so they have to keep reimplementing features they already had.
> how bad was the win10 task bar codebase
Well, in Windows 10 there's at least 4 different styles of context-menu in the Taskbar depending on where you click - so given that, I'm guessing it's a bit of a mess.
1. Right-click the Start button or empty space on the Taskbar: Win32 (USER32?) standard menu, but with a custom dark background and extra menu-item padding to make them touch-friendly. Earlier versions of Windows 10 used standard white menus with no extra padding. Uses the standard Windows menu font (Segoe?).
2. Right-click a pinned program icon: Aero Glass-effect jumplist menu with very smooth opening animation (seems to be the same UI framework as the Start Menu itself). Uses the standard Windows menu font (Segoe?).
3. Right-click a jumplist item: an opaque sub-menu that uses a much larger font-size, and I think a different typeface too. If the jumplist menu item is a shell object then this context menu will contain some (but not all) of the registered custom shell-wide menu items as in File Explorer and other views.
4. Right-click a window thumbnail: you get the window-menu for that window, which (on my computer) uses the standard Windows grey background and different font-sizes and metrics to all the other menus.
5. Right-click a custom Rebar[1] / Toolbar control in the Taskbar (I think they removed this feature from Windows 11?): you'll get whatever custom menu the author of the Rebar control decided to use.
6. Right-click an icon in the ("system tray") notification area (as opposed to the Action Center): as with Custom Rebars the menu style you get depends on the application - though tellingly different built-in standard/system Windows icons have different menus, e.g. right-click "Safely remove hardware" gives you a grey menu, but right-click the Volume icon and you'll get a black menu.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/reb...
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#26Earlier 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…
> 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, and there's a lot of these) get pissed because on top of having to pay Microsoft for new software (to avoid not getting updates for EOL software), they have to spend significant sums re-training employees, testing upgrade paths, rework internal tooling...
- 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 market for hardware sporting actual parallel ports or ISA slots is insane, because so much early 90s hardware runs on that)
- 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, and Apple announces BC breaks early enough / keeps support long enough that users can upgrade over time - aided by the fact that most hardware that people attach to Macs doesn't cost more than ten to fifty grands (=very expensive audio / video stuff) and has to be upgraded anyway to keep up with new features. That in turn puts pressure on Microsoft to keep up with innovation.
- on top of that, technical baggage keeps holding back Microsoft as well. Apple ditched Intel long ago and now reaps the reward - mostly, no transistor space wasted with long-superseded crap dating back to the 1980s and way better power management - while Microsoft is more or less at the whims of Intel's mismanagement and the utter crap that third-party ARM SoC vendors throw onto the market and dare call a CPU.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#27So my desktop PC does not support Windows 11 (according to Windows Update). I guess I shouldn't be too sad about that fact, but I am concerned about future compatibility.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#28Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#29Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
#30Small taskbar still missing. It makes no sense having such a large taskbar (in terms of height).
Taskbar program icon overlay icons (such as red/green/yellow status indicators for Skype and other IM programs, or the New Mail symbol for Outlook) are only visible in Large Taskbar mode - in Small Icons mode the overlays are entirely hidden. Those overlays do convey useful information, it's a shame MS couldn't find a way to make them work in Small Icons mode.
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Personally I can't stand Large Icon mode in Windows 10 because in Windows 10 it takes the 32x32 icons then downscales them to 24x24, even if there's a 24x24 icon available (whereas Windows 7 and 8 always used the 32x32 icons). I will agree that 24x24 sized icons seem to visually fit better in the Taskbar but the crazy part is that Windows 10 always downscales the 32x32 icons which makes them look slightly blurry: it never uses 24x24 icons if they're available, which lead to Google Chrome's icon designers having to compromise the Chrome logo icon so it would look better when downscaled: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=526622... (see comment 16 and 26)