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Comment by aksss | Hacker News Reader

I'm really disappointed in the center-justification of the task bar and start menu. I'm assuming that means the start menu icon will forever be creeping left as I open more apps, along with the start menu itself. Not a fan of this at all. There's an option to left-justify, I understand - and I like options - but would prefer left-justified to remain the default for users.

I assume they're building in the option to left-justify in case this move turns out to be another Windows 8 cock-up of a UI experience. I remember MS executives being "excited" about Windows 8 as well, it means little to nothing to me that Satya is excited about Win11.

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A mere hypothesis, but I wonder if that task bar centering wasn't pushed because of the increase in popularity of ultrawide screens as well as tablets (Microsoft has been pushing for Windows use on tablets for quite some time now). Because when you imagine a centered taskbar on an ultrawide screen or a tablet, it makes absolute sense and is preferable to having it on the left side of the screen. The centered taskbar doesn't work at all on smaller screens though.

Huge advantage of the start button on the bottom left: I can just “throw” my mouse pointer as far down and left as I can and click, and I’ll always hit the start button.

This is actual supported by Fitts' law, one of the very few laws in UX design [0]:

"Placing layout elements on the four edges of the screen allows for infinitely large targets in one dimension and therefore present ideal scenarios. As the user's pointer will always stop at the edge, they can move the mouse with the greatest possible speed and still hit the target. The target area is effectively infinitely long along the movement axis. Therefore, this guideline is called “Rule of the infinite edges”. The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which places the menu bar always on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current program's windowframe."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for...

Apparently you can put it back in the bottom left corner via an option.

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