5 ms·

Can somebody explain this to me? When Microsoft adds something like this, to the very valuable visual prime real estate taskbar, which is always visible at all

• secondcoming 4y ago
  Android has as unremovable Search bar that can't be removed. At least, I can't figure out how to get rid of it. I never use it.
  • agluszak 4y ago
    There's no single "Android" OS in the same sense as Windows. Do you mean AOSP? You can edit the source code and remove it yourself.
    • tbillington 4y ago
      > edit the source code and remove it yourself That is not a realistic option.
      • drkhn1234 4y ago
  • rentnorove 4y ago
    That search bar's part of the home screen app, which you can replace. Search for 'launcher' on the play store.
    • millzlane 4y ago
      The other launchers were always more feature rich compared to the launchers that come with some phones. I love having everything and the kitchen sink in case I need it.
• netruk44 4y ago
  They usually do. I only have experience with Windows 10, though (after the trainwreck that Win10 eventually became, I had to move away from Windows permanently). Weather, Skype and the search bar all had setting checkboxes to remove them and get the taskbar back to what it used to be before Microsoft decided the entirety of Windows was their personal Bing advertisement ground. (Also, as an ex-Microsoft employee, it's clear to me they only reason they're doing this stuff is to drive more 'organic' search traffic to Bing so they can have better numbers to show advertisers) It's possible with Windows 11 they simply haven't done the extra effort to make this change toggleable?
  • tssva 4y ago
    Windows 11 does have the option to remove these items including search from the taskbar. The person asking the question wants to leave search on the taskbar but remove the text "Search" from within the entry field for the search widget.
    • netruk44 4y ago
      Sorry, I'm bad at explaining myself, hah. I go on tangents. My point was that with Windows 10 there usually was a toggle for the changes they make to the taskbar. But for some reason, there doesn't appear to be for this one.
      • kyriakos 4y ago
        It's just the label though, won't change anything functional. It's like asking for an option to remove "What's of your mind?" from Facebook status input box.
  • alisonatwork 4y ago
    The Windows 11 task bar/start menu changes are really baffling to me because they really do change a bunch of stuff and then provide no way to turn them off. Most egregiously, if you just want apps in your start menu and remove the "recommended" fluff, then you literally end up with a start menu block which is half empty, and in the "recommended" half, it gives you a helpful link to the settings to turn back on the "recommended" option you just turned off. It's almost like someone at Microsoft is having a joke at their users' expense. The search is now also really hideous. Popping open random websites by default instead of files or applications on my own computer that are a better lexical match is incredibly annoying for a company that also makes VS Code, which almost always finds what you want when you type just a few letters of the thing.
• bitL 4y ago
  Nobody wants to use Windows Search but some Microsoft PM thought it's because people don't know what that box is and need a label to find it and use it...
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  If your design team is driven by metrics not vision then why would you offer the option to remove it having a metric saying people don’t like it makes the decision look bad, after all you’re being judged on how much you increase Bing hits. Really good design can only exist where you’re building to the vision of someone with good and opinionated taste. Building to only metrics is why trash like sign up gates on Twitter/Pinterest etc exist.
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    > good and opinionated taste I think that is an oxymoron. Opinionated is just an euphemism for dogmatic and hard to work with person. E.g. the Go formater that enforces no-tabs or whatever. I don't want the tool to force stuff on me, ever. Pushing a stupid button and refusing to make the users able to remove it is a typical opinionated design choice.
    • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
      Opinionated in the sense that you're trying to make the best tool possible and will spend time arguing back when people try and make it worse, like with suggesting the taskbar team focus should be improving Bing search hits metric. Un-opinionated people will just do what they're told and design trash.
• 323 4y ago
  You can actually remove it. But people prefer to be outraged. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hide-and-unhide-your-search-box-in-windows-6d8252b7-864f-c1b6-6a56-3eea0cda08dc#WindowsVersion=Windows_11 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hide-and-unhide-...
  • anon472555 4y ago
    Your link is about showing or hiding the search box. The question is about keeping the search box and hiding the search label.
  • p1esk 4y ago
    No you can’t. The label, not the search box.
  • somehnacct3757 4y ago
    The thread is about removing the label, not the whole search box. Which is a sort of silly thing to complain about, but Windows 11 has a lot of taskbar feature regressions. You can't even pin the thing to the left or right edge anymore. So I understand why users are frustrated. This all represents a philosophical shift in Windows ("the taskbar is Microsoft's, not yours") and it will be a painful adjustment for power users.
    • 323 4y ago
      > You can't even pin the thing to the left or right edge anymore. What if only 0.05% of users do that? Is it really worth all that entropy in code and test matrix for such a low usage feature?
      • somehnacct3757 4y ago
        That's not how Microsoft historically operates. Programs I wrote 20 years ago still work on Windows using ancient apis that they carry, because they care about backwards support. Whatever obscure msc or exe you ran in the 90s is still there, still runs, and still configures the OS. To this day you can check weird boxes deep in your disk config to put buggy behavior back into Windows, because it fixes a bug a single customer had decades ago. My theory is simpler: it was too hard to add new features to the taskbar (like wide search bars and now text fields) when you had to think about a tall and a wide configuration. So they cut the tall way. Now they can cram all sorts of features into your taskbar. It represents a shift in MS philosophy, closer to how Apple mandates progress in their OS.