Microsoft says changing taskbar location in Windows 11 is not important | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft says changing taskbar location in Windows 11 is not important

neowin.net

39 pointsMikusR36 comments

"Am I really that out of touch? No, it's the users that are wrong!"

It's really frustrating how it seems, despite having a thousand times more powerful hardware, modern software consistently struggles to do things that code written in the 1990s had no problem doing. I haven't really seen any convincing answers why adding 25 years of hardware and software advancements translates to being able to do less, to be less flexible.

Because the number of developers are reduced and are expected to do just enough ( in the name of agile methodology).

In the case of Windows is even more surprising to me knowing the huge process they done with Windows 95 to achieve what we finally had.

They had a lot of sessions of different people beta testing Windows 95 with different knowledge about computer, and they mould Windows using that feedback. Now with the "free beta testing" and the ease to give that feedback to Microsoft we are totally certain that Microsoft doesn't do those changes because they don't want to.

Microsoft has huge labs where they collect feedback but honestly I think try just ignore most of it.

Seems user feedback usually gets cherry picked and used to motivate pushing through unpopular changes.

Lets you dismiss those who complain about the change as an insignificant minority.

Almost every screen we use is wide-screen, yet almost every activity we use computers for involves scrolling through portrait documents. Putting the taskbar on the side reclaims some precious vertical space at the cost of fairly un-needed horizontal space. It's the logical choice - the only reason everyone doesn't do it is design inertia from when screens were 4:3. This is a shame.

Maybe some value a wider taskbar over one crammed to the side, even at the expense of 3.7% of their vertical space.

Or they value their horizontal space more than you do, because they like have a few windows side by side.

Or any other number of imaginable reasons.

A vertical taskbar is particularly useful when running on a screen with few pixel-equivalents (bad eyesight, or low angular view), a lot of software tends to break when going under 720 or even 768 equivalent-lines, this makes it less likely for important bottom buttons to end up "outside" of the screen.

the corner is a useful place because i can get my mouse there without knowing where my mouse is

Having something like the start button there ensures that nothing funky is being done to my pointer in the place where I'm looking for it

And if you move your start bar to the right, that button goes to the top right corner.

In my opinion it would be more logical to allow the entire task bar to shrink itself down into the Windows logo on the lefthand side like the MacOS 9 control strip. The user could then mouse over it or click it or use a certain key combination to restore it to the full screen width.

Getting rid of terrible widescreen monitors as the industry standard might also help (there are Chinese companies dabbling with 3:2 displays, so the market is there). The 16:9 aspect ratio is used purely to increase yields and decrease material costs. If Microsoft is mandating a TPM, they might as well mandate a display aspect ratio that makes their desktop UI semi-usable.

What surprises me is how little overlap you see between TV and monitor panels.

I figured that there was a lot of crossover due to the NTSC/ATSC transition basically occuring simultaneously with the CRT/LCD switchover. The demand to replace every TV set in the country meant they'd be making a bazillion 16:9 panels in every price and size grade imaginable.

The obvious assumption would be that the monitor industry would just exploit that, putting the cheap scale panels into good-enough monitors.

But even in the transition era, monitors were very different. Most affordable <32" TVs were 720p until well into the 2010s. I think the trend eventually reversed-- you started to see a lot of small 1080p TVs (back in the last few years you could even get small TVs) and I suspect it was because there were loads of 21-24" 1920x1080 monitor panels on the market.

What was the point of changing the Taskbar drastically in the first place? It's not something in Windows 10 I'd have identified as must fix unlike the mess that is search, control panel/settings etc. It got a whole bunch of regressions like the inability to move the Taskbar, grouping apps, having a clock on a another monitor (recently fixed), worse file operation indicators, etc. I just have no idea why they did it. It didn't actually IMPROVE anything it just looks slightly different. MS did a whole bunch of work to piss off people for as far as I can tell no noticeable gain.

The point is, just like Google, Apple and others, they want control over users computers. They want a walled garden.

But how does this change help Microsoft build a walled garden? Doesn't it do exactly the opposite, if it encourages people to download software to workaround the new bug/limitation?

Power users are a minority. They’re going after the masses who unbox their computer and click the Internet/Facebook icon.

The success of smartphones with a much more curated experience suggests the market values ease of use over customization.

MBA's using macs telling their ux and ui "engineers" to make things better by copying Apple.

If they had copied Apple you'd be able to move the taskbar.

The point was to get rid of legacy code. Plain and simple. That’s what they have been trying to do with explorer as well. Not saying it has been going all hunky dory. Also, I believe this specific statement regarding taskbar is their current stand - and will likely change later - considering the new taskbar is lacking so many other mission critical features which obviously take precedence over the ones which only a tiny fraction of community “want”.

It was originally made for the fully sandboxed dual screen Surface Neo (and similar dual screen/foldable devices from other manufacturers). That project failed (because every semi-competent developer at Windows division has either quit or moved to Azure). So they slapped together Windows 11 by merging Windows 10 and the shell from that failed project.

>But the funny thing about the taskbar is that the Feedback Hub directly clashes with what Tali Roth has said. The ability to move the taskbar is the most upvoted feedback piece, with more than 17,600 thumb-ups and 1200 comments. Unless Microsoft has another tool to source more feedback from "regular" users, you can tell quite a large chunk of Windows 11 customers want Microsoft to bring back the missing feature more than everything else.

It's probably a telemetry thing.

I would imagine the number of users with the taskbar in a different location on older versions are miniscule.

It's really easy to make up justifications for things with enough data.

Many ISPs who implemented low data caps on their services justified it as reasonable because "most people don't use more data than this" which while probably true, also relates to their being punishment for using more data.

Similar arguments can be made for most defaults "well the vast majority doesn't change it so..." while ignoring that those who go outside of the defaults value it highly and are more likely to be unhappy about the lack of options while their opinions get overshadowed by people who don't know there was an option in the first place.

> Only minor part of all people uses epipens, so we can stop manufacturing them.

> When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment is just huge.

"the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment" should be none? Unless "apps" refers to something other than standard Windows applications, there shouldn't be any difference since Windows 10.

I’ve had my taskbar on the left for the entire lifetime of windows 10. It saves me a few percent of needed scroll inputs to read code and over the years that’s a significant time saver.

As someone that needs to do this to minimize repetitive strain, yes it very much is important.

You can't do this on MacOS either, right?

You can position the Dock to bottom, left, or right.

Does it matter? You can do it in Windows 10. You can't do it in Windows 11. That is what is relevant here.

MacOS doesn’t have a taskbar, but it does have a dock that you can place on the left, right, or bottom edge of the screen. It has been an option since the beginning of OS X I believe.

Depends on what you consider the macOS taskbar equivalent.

The one where app icons and open documents live? Yeah, you can move it around.

The one that act as as the menu bar for open apps? No, you can’t.

It works in KDE, just as another data point.

MacOS also uses less vertical space.

And on the new macs, it takes up the space of the notch so that your apps are still in the un-notched section of the display.

Yes, you can. You can't move the menu bar at the top, but the dock can go to any of the other three edges of the display, and its popout items work just fine.

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