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Comment by aneutron | Hacker News Reader

This was genuinely one of the more intuitive parts of the task bar. Although I'm aware that you can pin applications to the task bar by right clicking. I surely hope they give alternative ways to pin stuff.

But in the article, here's what's pissing me off:

> In Windows 11, the taskbar lost some other quite popular features users enjoyed in Windows 10. For example, you can no longer move the taskbar to the top, right, or left.

Now I'm not a user of this feature. But in my immediate circle, no less than 6 of the many people I know work with windows (maybe 30 folks ?) use the task bar on the left or right (they have different monitor setups)

Sure, it's at best anecdotal, not very significant, but it's been there since the dawn of Windows ... That's really bound to piss off some people

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This was genuinely one of the more intuitive parts of the task bar.

Is it intuitive? I honestly didn't know this was something you could do, and it doesn't seem to work for me. The most I am able to do while dragging something to the taskbar is to pin it to the application that could open it. Other times I just get the same red 'X' as on Windows 11.

Is there a use pattern that I'm just not thinking of?

Perhaps right mouse click on the task bar and check to see if you have a checkmark next to "lock the taskbar"

Even with that check mark, I got the same behaviour as Goronmon. I've now installed 7+ Taskbar Tweaker as mentioned in a comment [1] by wayneftw and that lets you change "Pin to" to "Open with".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27924367

You'd probably want to remove that check mark if you want to move your taskbar (the checkmark indicates you want to lock it in place so it can't be moved).

try letting the file stay on the app icon for a few seconds, it should automatically switch to that window.

I’m sure Microsoft has the stats that shows almost no one uses drag and drop

Yes I think most people right click pin in context menu on an opened application

I move it to the top since most window interaction is at the top: menus, minimize, close. That way my nose travels less. The inability to move the taskbar to the top is disappointing.

> That way my nose travels less

Your mouse, you mean? Otherwise you have some explaining to do :)

Predictive text/autocorrect still sucks.

Hey it might be a really tall screen :D

Tilting your head to look at opposite edges of the screen can irritate the neck.

I didn't post the comment in question, but I'm sure they meant nose. Look at the top of the screen where a maximized window's menu bar is located. Notice where your nose is located. Next look at the bottom of the screen where the taskbar is located, and notice where your nose is located. Most likely your head moved a little and therefore your nose moved.

Next look at the top of the screen and then without moving your head, look at the taskbar. You can do it, but try it several times and it will probably start to feel a little weird. Your head is likely to want to move a bit, and holding it still takes effort.

YMMV.

I do the same

I use a left-side taskbar at work. Its excellent when you're running lots of Chrome windows or similar where the title bar text is useful. In the default bottom position, applications are quickly compressed so you cannot see the title, but as text runs left-right, the task bar can display far more items whilst preserving the title. It takes a bit of getting used to, but I thoroughly recommend it.

On my personal machine I rarely have duplicate windows, so I can rely on the icons.

> Now I'm not a user of this feature. But in my immediate circle, no less than 6 of the many people I know work with windows (maybe 30 folks ?) use the task bar on the left or right (they have different monitor setups)

That's very strange. I have been a Windows developer since the 90s so I've seen a lot of setups, between other developers and all the users I have had to interact with. So this number is in the thousands easily.

I've never seen a Windows taskbar not on the bottom outside of people just experimenting with layouts, similar to how people experiment with things like WindowBlinds or Classic Shell. I don't recall ever seeing this on a business user or even a developer machine.

I'm not even being hyperbolic here. I don't recall one single instance of remoting into a machine for support, or being sent a screenshot by an end-user, that has the taskbar anywhere but the bottom.

That's since Windows 3.1.

I’ve used the task bar this way. (Along the left vertically) it matches how I use macOS which has the dock along the left.

Can I ask why? Just why MS, who asked for this?

Was this really a feature people were complaining about? Really?????

Why remove this feature?

What logic is this?

Trying to imitate apple os?

It is Microsoft™ Logic®. It a variable can have only 2 states, with Microsoft™ Logic® you can have this variable in a third state which makes everyone look stoopid.

I have more than once accidentally moved the task bar. It causes a moment of panic until I remember that I can just move it back. And I'm a rather computer-literate person. For someone who is not a computer person, they could see this as "I broke it" and have no idea what to do, or even if they can continue to use the computer.

Best guess: someone or some group wanted to rewrite the Taskbar "from scratch" because of "all the tech debt crud making it a tough codebase to work in" and well a lot of that "tech debt" was all the stuff that made it customizable and supported drag-and-drop and all sorts of other things that users use every day but makes for a complicated codebase.

This - my theory is that there's a cadre of middle managers at Microsoft who are jealous of Apple, and express this as a persistent and pernicious trend toward imitating Apple "features." Not sure I've ever seen a single good thing come from the "user experience" crowd - sorry, you don't know better, gtfo my desktop.

I use it on the left because I have an ultra-wide monitor and run out of vertical space before horizontal space.

Same. I have a triple monitor setup and move it to the left.

ultrawide here. i'm stealing this idea; very smart.

Same! Not even on an ultrawide, but 16:9 laptops make usable vertical real estate a priority

I've had my taskbar in Windows at the top of the screen since 2005. Admittedly, there was no particular reason to move it there, but having done so I'm now used to it. Having to re-learn how to use my computer because the taskbar is at the bottom now sounds extremely offputting to me.

I've been doing it when I wanted open one program many times and prevent it from stacking so I can switch between instances faster.

Same group here, I have seen it a couple of times on the side, mostly left, but pretty much very isolated cases.

If I count it since 1992, and divide by the number of Windows devs I have met in life, it is pratically zero anyway.

I'm not playing the "Microsoft ux team knows best! " game anymore. This will effectively end Windows as a viable desktop for me. I have 3+ decades of muscle memory and a layout I like. It's more than inconvenient, it means months of my computer not behaving in the way I expect, in ways that I have specifically set up according to my preferences and needs. There's a lower threshold of pain in moving to Linux, and no rent seeking garbage ux teams to get in my way.

Even just different monitors. While supposedly both are 16:9, my main monitor and my laptop have very different proportions. The laptop feels cramped vertically, so I move the taskbar to the left edge to have more space. Guess I'll autohide it when I upgrade.

I have a left side taskbar on my work laptop. I hate it, but it's better than a bottom taskbar when im constrained to crappy 16:9 with 720 vertical pixels.

I've used a right-side taskbar since Windows XP, so yeah I've been feeling pretty angry about this.

I experimented with all four sides. When I last used it on the bottom I often had it "huge" (three or four rows) with auto-hide because I didn't want to cramp vertical space that much. I thought left and top got too much in the way of Fitt's Law related muscle memory. (More applications have important controls like menus to the top and left, and when maximized you are used to just rushing the mouse to the screen corner to access them, having to back across the taskbar never quite worked for me.)

Right-hand side seemed optimal to me in Windows XP and continues to feel that way today, especially as monitors have only gotten wider from when I started on classic square CRTs.

Since Vista introduced "Aero Peek" I felt far less of a need for window titles directly in the Taskbar, so I generally only ever use the Taskbar about the same width as the default height when at the bottom. (I like it just a tiny bit wider than that where on the main monitor in a vertical orientation Windows expands out the full date and day of the week in the clock panel.) At those widths my right side taskbars take up far fewer total pixels (and especially far fewer total unused "whitespace" pixels) on widescreen than a horizontal taskbar. It's especially a stark contrast on my ultrawidescreen home desktop where you just lose so much valuable screen real estate to wide empty expanses of taskbar when horizontal.

(I even appreciate the thought/theory behind the centering they are going for bringing things better into "eye line" on an ultrawide, but with all those wasted pixels around it I could be using to uncramp vertical space in apps, I think they have the right general idea but the very wrong implementation.)

On all the servers I manage, 250+, I put the task bar on the left or right. It's my quick and dirty way of making me visually identify where I am so I don't do anything stupid.

I had no idea this was a thing, and I've been using Windows since before Windows 3.0.

Well, Taskbar only existed since Windows 95 and onwards, so you're at least forgiven for the previous versions :)

But as far as I remember, even since '95 you could move the taskbar to whichever edge you wanted.

Everyone says they don't want to switch to Linux because they don't want to learn a new UI. That's why you do it once so you're not forced to with the next Windows update. I'm typing this on a machine with the same WM config I had on my first laptop 17 years ago.

I always place the taskbar at the top of the screen, and make sure that Outlook is the first icon in the taskbar, on the left (dragging & dropping it if I have to), so it's always in the same place.

Would not be happy if that no longer became possible.

I used to keep it on the left years ago, but I stopped doing that a long time ago. But typical Microsoft... everything becomes less flexible over time. The UI in Windows 2000 was light-years better than anything they've had in the last 10 years.

Only place I had to move taskbar to the top was their surface pro, because the edge of the screen lines up with the keyboard, making it difficult to tap on taskbar items or start button in the "laptop mode". What a joke

For what it's worth, there's a very easy registry edit that can be done to restore this functionality, but it's annoying it's not built-in anymore.

I place the taskbar on the right of the screen so hope this doesn't cause confusion for users who customize.

I haven't used Windows for many years at this point but, back when I did, my taskbar lived on the left (and was set to auto-hide). If I was still on Windows now then losing the ability to move it would be very jarring for me.

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