10 ms·

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 star

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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
        accoil 3y ago
        Oh, that's nice. explorer.exe crashing and taking out the taskbar is common enough for me to just sigh when it happens (and then launch the task manager via ctrl+shift+esc). I'm not sure if that's a Windows issue, or corporate malware issue, but maybe that'd mitigate it.
      - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        Win11 uses a new taskbar and start-menu that was originally never intended for desktop use: it was for a phablet UI for "Windows X" - which got killed-off and the code ported over to the main Windows codebase. I have no idea why.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    > win11 is a completely new program It’s barely a UI skin! It’s not even complete or self-consistent, and the original Win10 skin is still there under it, feature-complete. People noticed that certain boot failures of Win 11 bring back the original Win 10 look! It’s basically a “Mac mod” for Windows made by a bunch of Apple users working within Microsoft.
    - mangecoeur 3y ago
      Ironically, one of the qualities of the Mac is the consistency of the interface styling and UX irrespective of how specifically the task bar works, while Microsoft just keep adding layer on top of layer so that depending on which bit of the system you are in you get UI styles ranging from win11 through win2000 (plus, if you dig, a whole bunch of pixel art icons from win98).
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        At one point that was just quaint, now it's getting ridiculous.
      - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
        The Win 3.0 folder selection dialog is still around.
poisonborz 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    This sheds some light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
    - Bjartr 3y ago
      Thanks, I was thinking of exactly this post so it's useful you shared it!
    - anonymouskimmer 3y 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 3y ago
Tempest1981 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    And those that don’t probably just don’t know how or only ever open one window at a time.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    Really? It was like 2% around me. I prefer current style.
  - rob74 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  Hold off Microsoft! I got my girlfriend to try Linux because she like the bar on the side.
  - t0bia_s 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  Using startallback for this, no excuse for Microsoft but it seriously improved my windows 11 experience.
TiredOfLife 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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).

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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
      - accoil 3y ago
        Oh, that's nice. explorer.exe crashing and taking out the taskbar is common enough for me to just sigh when it happens (and then launch the task manager via ctrl+shift+esc). I'm not sure if that's a Windows issue, or corporate malware issue, but maybe that'd mitigate it.
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      Win11 uses a new taskbar and start-menu that was originally never intended for desktop use: it was for a phablet UI for "Windows X" - which got killed-off and the code ported over to the main Windows codebase. I have no idea why.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  > win11 is a completely new program It’s barely a UI skin! It’s not even complete or self-consistent, and the original Win10 skin is still there under it, feature-complete. People noticed that certain boot failures of Win 11 bring back the original Win 10 look! It’s basically a “Mac mod” for Windows made by a bunch of Apple users working within Microsoft.
  - mangecoeur 3y ago
    Ironically, one of the qualities of the Mac is the consistency of the interface styling and UX irrespective of how specifically the task bar works, while Microsoft just keep adding layer on top of layer so that depending on which bit of the system you are in you get UI styles ranging from win11 through win2000 (plus, if you dig, a whole bunch of pixel art icons from win98).
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      At one point that was just quaint, now it's getting ridiculous.
    - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
      The Win 3.0 folder selection dialog is still around.

poisonborz 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  This sheds some light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
  - Bjartr 3y ago
    Thanks, I was thinking of exactly this post so it's useful you shared it!
  - anonymouskimmer 3y 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 3y ago

Tempest1981 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  And those that don’t probably just don’t know how or only ever open one window at a time.
- fomine3 3y ago
  Really? It was like 2% around me. I prefer current style.
- rob74 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Hold off Microsoft! I got my girlfriend to try Linux because she like the bar on the side.
- t0bia_s 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Using startallback for this, no excuse for Microsoft but it seriously improved my windows 11 experience.

TiredOfLife 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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).