10 ms·

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

147 points by t0bia_s 4y ago

poisonborz 4y ago
There is an important change here compared to "classical" Windows, labeled taskbar item widths are now flexible. I really welcome this, others might not.
- darknavi 4y ago
  > I really welcome this, others might not. Basically any change to Windows these days.
mangecoeur 4y ago
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??
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  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.
  - mangecoeur 4y ago
    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.
    - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
      > 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/rebar-controls https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/reb...
      - mangecoeur 4y ago
        But is this fixed in win11? From what others tell me the win11 is actually just another skin on the same code. You can still find plenty of UI styles from previous windows in win11
        doodlesdev 4y ago
        Most of Windows 11 is indeed just a reskin, however the taskbar has been completely rewritten and isn't coupled to explorer.exe anymore, being it's own WinUI application.
- poisonborz 4y ago
  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.
  - Tempest1981 4y ago
    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 :-)
    - poisonborz 4y ago
      This sheds some light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
      - Bjartr 4y ago
        Thanks, I was thinking of exactly this post so it's useful you shared it!
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        > I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook The more you make it like a Mac, the less barrier there is for a user to jump ship to a Mac. I wonder if any of the increase in Apple marketshare is due to Windows becoming more Mac-like.
  - logifail 4y ago
- Tempest1981 4y ago
  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?)
- rob74 4y ago
  Well, they didn't scrap it and start from zero... at least the labels were already disabled in Windows 7 by default, and more than 10 years later they thought it would be safe to remove them completely, but looks like they were wrong. Personally, the Windows 7-style task bar (icons only and combining quick launch icons with the task bar) was one of the few innovations (yeah, I know it was heavily inspired by MacOS) that I actually liked about newer Windows versions. I even carried it over to KDE by using the "Icons-only task manager".
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > the labels were already disabled in Windows 7 by default And literally every Windows user I personally know has turned them back on.
    - Auracle 4y ago
      And those that don’t probably just don’t know how or only ever open one window at a time.
    - fomine3 4y ago
      Really? It was like 2% around me. I prefer current style.
    - rob74 4y ago
      Ok... I can sympathize with wanting to keep the old UI (I installed the "Classic Start Menu" under Windows 7 too), but I like the icons-only taskbar better than the old one. I use Alt+Tab to switch between apps, so I see the window titles there, I don't need them taking up valuable space in the taskbar. The taskbar is there to launch apps and see at a glance what apps are currently open.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Sure, different people have different needs. That's why options are good. Personally, I like to have the labels with the icons because the icons all by themselves tend to be awful at signaling what applications they go with. Having labels means I can just click on what I want straight away without having to hunt through them first.
- crispyambulance 4y ago
  Slow clap for windows 11 taskbar! Now…. When will they bring back the ability to park your taskbar vertically on the left hand side? Another 2 years?
  - toastal 4y ago
    Hold off Microsoft! I got my girlfriend to try Linux because she like the bar on the side.
    - t0bia_s 4y ago
      Exactly my case two years ago. After while of using Fedora she said "I though linux is more different." She forgets on Win quickly and probably never go back.
      - toastal 4y ago
        I ended up picking Fedora too because I thought KDE Plasma and Fedora would be easy, stable, and up-to-date enough. There hasn't been much issue so far. I really wanted to go NixOS like I run to make it reproducible, but the casual user ergonomics would be too difficult. :(
  - BadJo0Jo0 4y ago
    I've been using valinet/ExplorerPatcher on Win11 for a bit just to bring back all the old Win10 taskbar stuff. I know we should even need this, but I hope this is helpful. https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
    - psd1 4y ago
      Sadly that's x64 only and will likely never support Arm, so I've been stuck with the shitty taskbar on the VM on my mac. Works very well on x64 though.
  - kyriakos 4y ago
    Using startallback for this, no excuse for Microsoft but it seriously improved my windows 11 experience.
- TiredOfLife 4y ago
  They had a huge failure with Surface Neo and the OS (and the taskbar/start menu) they were making for it Windows 10x. After Neo was cancelled they tried to retool 10x for ordinary laptops. After that failed they took the crappy start/taskbar meant for dual screen/one app per screen devices, slapped it on top of latest insider version of Windows 10, introduced arbitrary cpu cutoff (so essentially screwing a large part of Windows insiders) and called it Windows 11.
  - sometimesjerks 4y ago
    There's some truth to this -- it's 100% the taskbar from 10X, but there's a lot of other changes for 11 (settings, taskbar stuff like volume controller, file explorer). Secondary goal was probably to decouple/undock the taskbar from the main OS which would require rebuilding some parts.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  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.
- brundolf 4y ago
  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
- LoganDark 4y ago
  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
- w0m 4y ago
  > 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?
- cududa 4y ago
  The taskbar wasn't just the "Windows 10 taskbar". It's pretty much had code left over from Win95 and just was continually built on top of. It desperately needed a rewrite from scratch.
- wnevets 4y ago
  > What was so problematic about the Windows 10 taskbar that they had to completely scrap it and start from zero?? Why stop there? Lets go back to the Windows 7 Taskbar. I remember that being better than Windows 10.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  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.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  No one besides WinDev cares anylonger about WinRT/WinUI, so WinDev has starting to re-implement the Windows shell in WinUI to prove that they still care about WinRT and WinUI. The 2 years delay shows how resource constrained the whole WinUI team is, and how far they are to reach feature parity with UWP, or raw Win32. Plus the team behind Windows 10X had to do something (that is how Windows 11 came to be).
Eldandan 4y ago
Never Combine and Only Combine when Full. Two missing features that were literally keeping me from upgrading to 11.
- jabbany 4y ago
  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)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jwestbury 4y ago
  I quite literally paid for a third-party app (StartAllBack) to do this for me (amongst other things).
  - slig 4y ago
    I'm glad I found about this small App a while back. Super useful and incredibly cheap for the amount of small issues it solves.
  - nunuvit 4y ago
    I've been using ExplorerPatcher.
  - kyriakos 4y ago
    Great app, highly recommended and with 100 days trial on top of being super cheap
nobrains 4y ago
Until Microsoft introduces "Never Combine App Icons" to Windows 11, you can use this little enhancement to do it: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki
AstralStorm 4y ago
Still no vertical taskbar. Horizontal is a waste of precious screen estate.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  If you are willing to use a commercial (though cheap with $5) app, I use StartAllBack [0] for this. [0]: https://www.startallback.com/ https://www.startallback.com/
- Algent 4y ago
  I miss the 16/10 era of monitors so much. I saw it advertised as a feature in some recent laptop.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    My laptop is a 16:10 screen! I love it.
  - seritools 4y ago
    Lots of notebooks thankfully adopted 16:10 or even 3:2 again, yeah.
  - coldpie 4y ago
    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.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      I think you mean 4:3
      - skullt 4y ago
        Maybe they compute in tate mode.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
fleaaa 4y ago
vertical/top taskbar for another couple year I suppose.. I'm glad I finally cut all the tie to Windows.
cypress66 4y ago
Small taskbar still missing. It makes no sense having such a large taskbar (in terms of height).
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  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. --- 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#c16 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=526622... (see comment 16 and 26)
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    It'd be nice if it'd use the best resolution available but the Chrome icon needed to be fixed regardless. Windows doesn't guarantee a quantized DPI so the icon is always going to need to scale.
- Stratoscope 4y ago
  Indeed. I have been using Explorer Patcher only for the single reason that I don't need or want a big tall taskbar. I was fine with my "small icon" taskbar from Windows 10. And then some whoever said "We need a brand new taskbar because our code is too complicated and it's hard to maintain! Those people who preferred the smaller taskbar? It's their loss. We can't afford the development time to support that legacy feature in our complete rewrite!"
dom96 4y ago
So 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.
- aksss 4y ago
  I wouldn’t worry about future compatibility anytime soon but Win11 is starting to get some noticeable feature improvements that won’t ever come to Win10 - e.g. phone link for iPhones, sandbox reboots.
farmin 4y ago
I used Windows server 2022 for first time today on a vps. It's what I imagine we all want windows to be. Just simple Windows 10ish ui without all the fluff. I imagine its very stable too given its for servers. Reminds me of Windows 2000 I ran on my Pentium 2. Does anyone just use Windows sever 2022 on their desktop? Why not?
- qwertox 4y ago
  > Just simple Windows 10ish ui without all the fluff. Windows 10 UI is far more confusing than Windows 7, with the new and old configuration dialogs.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago
    > Windows 10 UI is far more confusing than Windows 7 I don't care much, I just want good old Windows I am familiar with. For any but a very non-complex system, a revamped UI always feeld more confusing if you are an experienced user already. > with the new and old configuration dialogs. I just love the old and dread the day they will be removed.
  - ConceptJunkie 4y ago
    Windows 7 was the last Windows UI I didn't hate. With the exception of Task Manager, which was seriously spiffed up, there's very little about Windows 10 that I prefer over Windows 7, and a whole lot that's objectively worse.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  The equivalent OS for desktops is the Windows 11 Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release, which is what you described but with desktop pricing and a few minor differences. I once used an older LTSC version for a virtual desktop fleet because it’s a lot better behaved at scale. You don’t want to use a “normal” release because Microsoft will randomly push a critical 4 gigabyte update… to Minecraft. When 60K VMs update at once on a single SAN array, it’s not pretty. That, or Microsoft will randomly decide to install TikTok by default on virtual desktops used from terminals in operating theatres. I had a Microsoft consultant review our system and I swear his report said “we don’t recommend LTSC, you should use Current Branch” at least fifteen times. That’s when I realised that there was some serious KPI pressure within Microsoft to get users onto the full-telemetry, riddled-with-ads version.
danielrpa 4y ago
YES! Thank you for focusing on productivity instead of copying Apple's obsolete UI.
- ChancyChance 4y ago
  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.
  - danielrpa 4y ago
    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.
qwerty456127 4y ago
I hope they are also going to add support for left/top alignment of the icons (the classic way), for removal of left&right margins in centered alignment (Mac way) so places to the left and right of the icons would be free screen space rather than empty panel area, good support for horizontal panel placing, turn system icons (unmount device, network indicators, sound volume&output control, keyboard layout indicator, clock and calemdar etc) into first-class panel icons rather than tray icons (they just look ugly in case of horizontal panel placement).
- ChancyChance 4y ago
  The first half of that (alignment) already exists.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  Fix: I meant good support for vertical panel placing. Horizontal obviously has always been reasonably good. Vertical has always been more or less ugly and I am not sure if it is supported in Windows 11 at all.
lgl 4y ago
Hopefully they'll also bring back the ability to middle click on tray icons that they apparently silently broke/removed recently when they released the so called Windows 11 Moment 2 update with these new taskbar and tray area "improvements", even though they do not acknowledge it when reporting it on the feedback hub, their github issue trackers, their twitter, etc.
_Parfait_ 4y ago
They cave every time.
- silon42 4y ago
  What do you mean cave... taskbar with those features is essential... If the OS doesn't have that, it sucks and I need 3rd party alternatives to make it usable.
bsnnkv 4y ago
What an absolute mess. In the meantime I'm glad to have seen alternatives like yasb[1] popping up. [1]: https://github.com/denBot/yasb https://github.com/denBot/yasb
WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
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
- pphysch 4y ago
  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.
- RajT88 4y ago
  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 catalog (see: GameGear SMS converter, which was HUGE, limited memory for downloading games onto PSP, no legal path for importing your PS1 library into the PSP from physical disks). Imagine the market share Microsoft would have if they made an Xbox One or before that Xbox 360 portable, which could play your existing library using cloud saves.
  - WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
    I totally agree with you! This for example should have been a microsoft product: https://gpd.hk/gpdwin4 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..
- pohuing 4y ago
brundolf 4y ago
I figured this would happen, and I figured I'd have a few years to hold off updating before they forced me to. Glad it looks like things are going to be mostly back to par by then
- RajT88 4y ago
  The weird thing is - Microsoft doesn't seem to expect to piss anyone off with stuff like this. They seem quite surprised every single time. I really have to wonder about the process the Windows team follows.
JohnFen 4y ago
"Never combine app icons" HOORAY!! At least we won't have to suffer that particular torment.
oktwtf 4y ago
Are there any active alternate shell packages for Windows? I used to run Blackbox4Windows or BBLean way back when. Very stale these days though.
- RajT88 4y ago
  CairoShell is something I've used recently. It's active.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_f...
kleiba 4y ago
These small animations in the task bar look very Linux-ish to me, and not in a good way. They're too playful IMO, and will probably start feeling annoying quite quickly.
perryizgr8 4y ago
Unless a UI is completely broken, or you want the user to do something completely different, there is no reason to make large changes. You can continue making incremental improvements for years, just look at macos. Windows 7 taskbar was great. Windows 10 added a few improvements. Windows 11 restarted from scratch for no reason whatsoever. I think they only way this happens is if nobody in the entire org has a cohesive vision for the product. It's every man for himself. Somebody wanted to implement a new taskbar from scratch, and they had enough pull within the company. So they got to do it. Users and product be dammed.
Night_Thastus 4y ago
What is meant by "labels"? What I really want is the ability to categorize and separate out certain icons. Like creating little groups. One for browsers, one for productivity, one for games, one for utilities, etc. That would be so amazing. You can hack a way of doing it by creating an empty executable with an icon that looks like a divider, but that's just painful to do.
- pynappo 4y ago
  By labels I believe they just mean window titles in the taskbar.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  The existing windows 11 taskbar just has the application icon with the windows grouped - so if you have 3 firefox windows open, you get one icon for firefox and never any text associated. If there's an open application its differentiated from a shortcut with a dot underneath. https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2021/06/microsoft-windows-11-taskbar-closeup-large-100892432-large.jpg https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2021/06/microsoft-w... It seems windows is bringing back text in the taskbar items, and exists in windows 10 (you get an icon and text in a rectangle), and allowing you to leave windows ungrouped which isn't currently possible.
nayuki 4y ago
Thank you! I am very fond of the non-grouped taskbar with title text and small icons, which is the classic functional design in Windows 95/98/2000/Me. I turned off grouping ever since XP. Starting in 7, I turned off the default big icons and re-enabled text. This served me well in 8 and 10. But seeing how Windows 11 had the useless, offensive taskbar, I vowed to never upgrade to it and declare 10 as the end of the line. But now there is hope again.
rawling 4y ago
Can we have "right click on an item pinned to the Start Menu to see its recent document list" back next please?

147 points by t0bia_s 4y ago

There is an important change here compared to "classical" Windows, labeled taskbar item widths are now flexible. I really welcome this, others might not.

darknavi 4y ago
> I really welcome this, others might not. Basically any change to Windows these days.

mangecoeur 4y ago

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??

tinus_hn 4y ago
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.
- mangecoeur 4y ago
  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.
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    > 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/rebar-controls https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/reb...
    - mangecoeur 4y ago
      But is this fixed in win11? From what others tell me the win11 is actually just another skin on the same code. You can still find plenty of UI styles from previous windows in win11
      - doodlesdev 4y ago
        Most of Windows 11 is indeed just a reskin, however the taskbar has been completely rewritten and isn't coupled to explorer.exe anymore, being it's own WinUI application.
poisonborz 4y ago
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.
- Tempest1981 4y ago
  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 :-)
  - poisonborz 4y ago
    This sheds some light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
    - Bjartr 4y ago
      Thanks, I was thinking of exactly this post so it's useful you shared it!
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      > I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook The more you make it like a Mac, the less barrier there is for a user to jump ship to a Mac. I wonder if any of the increase in Apple marketshare is due to Windows becoming more Mac-like.
- logifail 4y ago
Tempest1981 4y ago
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?)
rob74 4y ago
Well, they didn't scrap it and start from zero... at least the labels were already disabled in Windows 7 by default, and more than 10 years later they thought it would be safe to remove them completely, but looks like they were wrong. Personally, the Windows 7-style task bar (icons only and combining quick launch icons with the task bar) was one of the few innovations (yeah, I know it was heavily inspired by MacOS) that I actually liked about newer Windows versions. I even carried it over to KDE by using the "Icons-only task manager".
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > the labels were already disabled in Windows 7 by default And literally every Windows user I personally know has turned them back on.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    And those that don’t probably just don’t know how or only ever open one window at a time.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Really? It was like 2% around me. I prefer current style.
  - rob74 4y ago
    Ok... I can sympathize with wanting to keep the old UI (I installed the "Classic Start Menu" under Windows 7 too), but I like the icons-only taskbar better than the old one. I use Alt+Tab to switch between apps, so I see the window titles there, I don't need them taking up valuable space in the taskbar. The taskbar is there to launch apps and see at a glance what apps are currently open.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Sure, different people have different needs. That's why options are good. Personally, I like to have the labels with the icons because the icons all by themselves tend to be awful at signaling what applications they go with. Having labels means I can just click on what I want straight away without having to hunt through them first.
crispyambulance 4y ago
Slow clap for windows 11 taskbar! Now…. When will they bring back the ability to park your taskbar vertically on the left hand side? Another 2 years?
- toastal 4y ago
  Hold off Microsoft! I got my girlfriend to try Linux because she like the bar on the side.
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    Exactly my case two years ago. After while of using Fedora she said "I though linux is more different." She forgets on Win quickly and probably never go back.
    - toastal 4y ago
      I ended up picking Fedora too because I thought KDE Plasma and Fedora would be easy, stable, and up-to-date enough. There hasn't been much issue so far. I really wanted to go NixOS like I run to make it reproducible, but the casual user ergonomics would be too difficult. :(
- BadJo0Jo0 4y ago
  I've been using valinet/ExplorerPatcher on Win11 for a bit just to bring back all the old Win10 taskbar stuff. I know we should even need this, but I hope this is helpful. https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
  - psd1 4y ago
    Sadly that's x64 only and will likely never support Arm, so I've been stuck with the shitty taskbar on the VM on my mac. Works very well on x64 though.
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Using startallback for this, no excuse for Microsoft but it seriously improved my windows 11 experience.
TiredOfLife 4y ago
They had a huge failure with Surface Neo and the OS (and the taskbar/start menu) they were making for it Windows 10x. After Neo was cancelled they tried to retool 10x for ordinary laptops. After that failed they took the crappy start/taskbar meant for dual screen/one app per screen devices, slapped it on top of latest insider version of Windows 10, introduced arbitrary cpu cutoff (so essentially screwing a large part of Windows insiders) and called it Windows 11.
- sometimesjerks 4y ago
  There's some truth to this -- it's 100% the taskbar from 10X, but there's a lot of other changes for 11 (settings, taskbar stuff like volume controller, file explorer). Secondary goal was probably to decouple/undock the taskbar from the main OS which would require rebuilding some parts.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
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.
brundolf 4y ago
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
LoganDark 4y ago
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
w0m 4y ago
> 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?
cududa 4y ago
The taskbar wasn't just the "Windows 10 taskbar". It's pretty much had code left over from Win95 and just was continually built on top of. It desperately needed a rewrite from scratch.
wnevets 4y ago
> What was so problematic about the Windows 10 taskbar that they had to completely scrap it and start from zero?? Why stop there? Lets go back to the Windows 7 Taskbar. I remember that being better than Windows 10.
raffraffraff 4y ago
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.
pjmlp 4y ago
No one besides WinDev cares anylonger about WinRT/WinUI, so WinDev has starting to re-implement the Windows shell in WinUI to prove that they still care about WinRT and WinUI. The 2 years delay shows how resource constrained the whole WinUI team is, and how far they are to reach feature parity with UWP, or raw Win32. Plus the team behind Windows 10X had to do something (that is how Windows 11 came to be).

Eldandan 4y ago

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

jabbany 4y ago
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)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jwestbury 4y ago
I quite literally paid for a third-party app (StartAllBack) to do this for me (amongst other things).
- slig 4y ago
  I'm glad I found about this small App a while back. Super useful and incredibly cheap for the amount of small issues it solves.
- nunuvit 4y ago
  I've been using ExplorerPatcher.
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Great app, highly recommended and with 100 days trial on top of being super cheap

nobrains 4y ago

Until Microsoft introduces "Never Combine App Icons" to Windows 11, you can use this little enhancement to do it: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki

AstralStorm 4y ago

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

Semaphor 4y ago
If you are willing to use a commercial (though cheap with $5) app, I use StartAllBack [0] for this. [0]: https://www.startallback.com/ https://www.startallback.com/
Algent 4y ago
I miss the 16/10 era of monitors so much. I saw it advertised as a feature in some recent laptop.
- Arrath 4y ago
  My laptop is a 16:10 screen! I love it.
- seritools 4y ago
  Lots of notebooks thankfully adopted 16:10 or even 3:2 again, yeah.
- coldpie 4y ago
  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.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    I think you mean 4:3
    - skullt 4y ago
      Maybe they compute in tate mode.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago

fleaaa 4y ago

vertical/top taskbar for another couple year I suppose.. I'm glad I finally cut all the tie to Windows.

cypress66 4y ago

Small taskbar still missing. It makes no sense having such a large taskbar (in terms of height).

DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
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. --- 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#c16 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=526622... (see comment 16 and 26)
- zamadatix 4y ago
  It'd be nice if it'd use the best resolution available but the Chrome icon needed to be fixed regardless. Windows doesn't guarantee a quantized DPI so the icon is always going to need to scale.
Stratoscope 4y ago
Indeed. I have been using Explorer Patcher only for the single reason that I don't need or want a big tall taskbar. I was fine with my "small icon" taskbar from Windows 10. And then some whoever said "We need a brand new taskbar because our code is too complicated and it's hard to maintain! Those people who preferred the smaller taskbar? It's their loss. We can't afford the development time to support that legacy feature in our complete rewrite!"

dom96 4y ago

So 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.

aksss 4y ago
I wouldn’t worry about future compatibility anytime soon but Win11 is starting to get some noticeable feature improvements that won’t ever come to Win10 - e.g. phone link for iPhones, sandbox reboots.

farmin 4y ago

I used Windows server 2022 for first time today on a vps. It's what I imagine we all want windows to be. Just simple Windows 10ish ui without all the fluff. I imagine its very stable too given its for servers. Reminds me of Windows 2000 I ran on my Pentium 2. Does anyone just use Windows sever 2022 on their desktop? Why not?

qwertox 4y ago
> Just simple Windows 10ish ui without all the fluff. Windows 10 UI is far more confusing than Windows 7, with the new and old configuration dialogs.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  > Windows 10 UI is far more confusing than Windows 7 I don't care much, I just want good old Windows I am familiar with. For any but a very non-complex system, a revamped UI always feeld more confusing if you are an experienced user already. > with the new and old configuration dialogs. I just love the old and dread the day they will be removed.
- ConceptJunkie 4y ago
  Windows 7 was the last Windows UI I didn't hate. With the exception of Task Manager, which was seriously spiffed up, there's very little about Windows 10 that I prefer over Windows 7, and a whole lot that's objectively worse.
jiggawatts 4y ago
The equivalent OS for desktops is the Windows 11 Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release, which is what you described but with desktop pricing and a few minor differences. I once used an older LTSC version for a virtual desktop fleet because it’s a lot better behaved at scale. You don’t want to use a “normal” release because Microsoft will randomly push a critical 4 gigabyte update… to Minecraft. When 60K VMs update at once on a single SAN array, it’s not pretty. That, or Microsoft will randomly decide to install TikTok by default on virtual desktops used from terminals in operating theatres. I had a Microsoft consultant review our system and I swear his report said “we don’t recommend LTSC, you should use Current Branch” at least fifteen times. That’s when I realised that there was some serious KPI pressure within Microsoft to get users onto the full-telemetry, riddled-with-ads version.

danielrpa 4y ago

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

ChancyChance 4y ago
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.
- danielrpa 4y ago
  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.

qwerty456127 4y ago

I hope they are also going to add support for left/top alignment of the icons (the classic way), for removal of left&right margins in centered alignment (Mac way) so places to the left and right of the icons would be free screen space rather than empty panel area, good support for horizontal panel placing, turn system icons (unmount device, network indicators, sound volume&output control, keyboard layout indicator, clock and calemdar etc) into first-class panel icons rather than tray icons (they just look ugly in case of horizontal panel placement).

ChancyChance 4y ago
The first half of that (alignment) already exists.
qwerty456127 4y ago
Fix: I meant good support for vertical panel placing. Horizontal obviously has always been reasonably good. Vertical has always been more or less ugly and I am not sure if it is supported in Windows 11 at all.

lgl 4y ago

Hopefully they'll also bring back the ability to middle click on tray icons that they apparently silently broke/removed recently when they released the so called Windows 11 Moment 2 update with these new taskbar and tray area "improvements", even though they do not acknowledge it when reporting it on the feedback hub, their github issue trackers, their twitter, etc.

_Parfait_ 4y ago

They cave every time.

silon42 4y ago
What do you mean cave... taskbar with those features is essential... If the OS doesn't have that, it sucks and I need 3rd party alternatives to make it usable.

bsnnkv 4y ago

What an absolute mess. In the meantime I'm glad to have seen alternatives like yasb[1] popping up. [1]: https://github.com/denBot/yasb https://github.com/denBot/yasb

WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago

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

pphysch 4y ago
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.
RajT88 4y ago
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 catalog (see: GameGear SMS converter, which was HUGE, limited memory for downloading games onto PSP, no legal path for importing your PS1 library into the PSP from physical disks). Imagine the market share Microsoft would have if they made an Xbox One or before that Xbox 360 portable, which could play your existing library using cloud saves.
- WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
  I totally agree with you! This for example should have been a microsoft product: https://gpd.hk/gpdwin4 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..
pohuing 4y ago

brundolf 4y ago

I figured this would happen, and I figured I'd have a few years to hold off updating before they forced me to. Glad it looks like things are going to be mostly back to par by then

RajT88 4y ago
The weird thing is - Microsoft doesn't seem to expect to piss anyone off with stuff like this. They seem quite surprised every single time. I really have to wonder about the process the Windows team follows.

JohnFen 4y ago

"Never combine app icons" HOORAY!! At least we won't have to suffer that particular torment.

oktwtf 4y ago

Are there any active alternate shell packages for Windows? I used to run Blackbox4Windows or BBLean way back when. Very stale these days though.

RajT88 4y ago
CairoShell is something I've used recently. It's active.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_f...

kleiba 4y ago

These small animations in the task bar look very Linux-ish to me, and not in a good way. They're too playful IMO, and will probably start feeling annoying quite quickly.

perryizgr8 4y ago

Unless a UI is completely broken, or you want the user to do something completely different, there is no reason to make large changes. You can continue making incremental improvements for years, just look at macos. Windows 7 taskbar was great. Windows 10 added a few improvements. Windows 11 restarted from scratch for no reason whatsoever. I think they only way this happens is if nobody in the entire org has a cohesive vision for the product. It's every man for himself. Somebody wanted to implement a new taskbar from scratch, and they had enough pull within the company. So they got to do it. Users and product be dammed.

Night_Thastus 4y ago

What is meant by "labels"? What I really want is the ability to categorize and separate out certain icons. Like creating little groups. One for browsers, one for productivity, one for games, one for utilities, etc. That would be so amazing. You can hack a way of doing it by creating an empty executable with an icon that looks like a divider, but that's just painful to do.

pynappo 4y ago
By labels I believe they just mean window titles in the taskbar.
LegitShady 4y ago
The existing windows 11 taskbar just has the application icon with the windows grouped - so if you have 3 firefox windows open, you get one icon for firefox and never any text associated. If there's an open application its differentiated from a shortcut with a dot underneath. https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2021/06/microsoft-windows-11-taskbar-closeup-large-100892432-large.jpg https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2021/06/microsoft-w... It seems windows is bringing back text in the taskbar items, and exists in windows 10 (you get an icon and text in a rectangle), and allowing you to leave windows ungrouped which isn't currently possible.

nayuki 4y ago

Thank you! I am very fond of the non-grouped taskbar with title text and small icons, which is the classic functional design in Windows 95/98/2000/Me. I turned off grouping ever since XP. Starting in 7, I turned off the default big icons and re-enabled text. This served me well in 8 and 10. But seeing how Windows 11 had the useless, offensive taskbar, I vowed to never upgrade to it and declare 10 as the end of the line. But now there is hope again.

rawling 4y ago

Can we have "right click on an item pinned to the Start Menu to see its recent document list" back next please?