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Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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 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'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.

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

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