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Comment by ofubd8kc | Hacker News Reader

The classic Win 95 bottom left Start button location has the advantage of being an 'infinite mouse target': rapidly flicking the mouse down-left always gets you there instantly because you can't overshoot the target, nor can you miss, neither to the left nor to the right. With the new centered placement you now must perform a slower aiming task.

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In Win9x, if you move the cursor to the lower left corner of the screen, then left click, the cursor actually jumps to the Start button.

Instead of making the click target extend to the corner, MS chose to move the cursor a few pixels when a click happens in that little corner.

Except if you installed Office and it added its keyboard language toolbarlet, then the taskbar becomes a few pixels higher once more and if you click the bottom row Windows moves you cursor up a few pixels and you still miss the button.

Microsoft just stinks at this, its all over Windows 10 as well with windows that are almost maximized to full screen, but for the top row. So if you click to the top right of the screen you close the window behind the one you wanted to close.

It's called Fort's law in the usability research. It is very basic usability principle. Not following it means designers are either idiots, as you learn this on the first university course, or make design for the sake of design.

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/fitts-l...

Assuming you mean the linked "Fitt's law", I don't see how this would apply here. If the icon size and the distance are the same, this law wouldn't differentiate between the button being in the middle or on the left of the taskbar.

It does: if it's in the middle of the taskbar, the area is infinitely long only on one axis, you still have to move your mouse on the correct place on the X axis (as determined by the icon size).

If it's on the far left, the target area is infinitely large on both axes, just throw your mouse somewhere down left and you'll land on target 100% of the time.

Microsoft did not follow it when they designed Edge. They copied Chrome’s leftmost tab spacing, but didn’t copy how Chrome counts that as a clickable target for the leftmost tab.

There's an option to shift the start button and taskbar buttons back over to the left.

There are options to make all kinds of changes to Windows--but these are difficult to find so most users simply use the defaults.

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