Windows 11’s taskbar is finally getting labels and never combine app icons
theverge.com
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Even though I'm happy (this was also a dealbreaker for me, even though you could hack the old taskbar via dll-s) I think this shows how much in a deadlock Windows OS development is. Almost all of the recent changes are surface-level, on one side you have employees disconnected from the core user base, on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility.
Ah, those users. Users who want their OS to stay firmly in the background and let them get on with their jobs, and who aren't actually that bothered about "feature" upgrades every month or three.
Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product.
The curse of products that are - in their foundations - over thirty years old and used by billions of people. To expand:
- any time Microsoft does fundamental changes to the look and feel or to management/configuration, enterprise users (the kind that buys tens of thousands of licenses at a time, and there's a lot of these) get pissed because on top of having to pay Microsoft for new software (to avoid not getting updates for EOL software), they have to spend significant sums re-training employees, testing upgrade paths, rework internal tooling...
- if MS breaks too much or forgets to add compatibility modes/quirks, said enterprise customers are going to be pretty pissed because that can sometimes mean they have to buy new machines costing many millions of dollars (the market for hardware sporting actual parallel ports or ISA slots is insane, because so much early 90s hardware runs on that)
- at the same time, desktop Linux distributions and macOS keep iterating and innovating without having that burden. Linux userland generally doesn't care a bit about backwards compatibility, and Apple announces BC breaks early enough / keeps support long enough that users can upgrade over time - aided by the fact that most hardware that people attach to Macs doesn't cost more than ten to fifty grands (=very expensive audio / video stuff) and has to be upgraded anyway to keep up with new features. That in turn puts pressure on Microsoft to keep up with innovation.
- on top of that, technical baggage keeps holding back Microsoft as well. Apple ditched Intel long ago and now reaps the reward - mostly, no transistor space wasted with long-superseded crap dating back to the 1980s and way better power management - while Microsoft is more or less at the whims of Intel's mismanagement and the utter crap that third-party ARM SoC vendors throw onto the market and dare call a CPU.
That's a bit of a re-write of history. Mac OS tried to throw away all backwards compatibly on day one but major software vendors told them to pound sand so they had to spend another year building out Carbon. Not to mention that Mac OS X itself is built on NextSTEP.
Linux breaks front-end compatibility so much that never seem to make much progress on stability.
> on top of that, technical baggage keeps holding back Microsoft as well. Apple ditched Intel long ago and now reaps the reward
It's not technical baggage that is the problem. It's strategic issue. Microsoft had a fully functional build of Windows 7 for ARM a long time ago. The problem is they never just released an ARM version of their OS and let developers port their code to it. It was always paired with a new API, the windows store, a locked down version of the OS, etc, etc. This might be specifically to avoid pissing off their hardware partners.
Windows NT was always multi-platform and they always made sure it would build and run on non-Intel CPUs. It has never been a technical issue.
New features or APIs in MacOS are adopted much faster than in Linux world, too (see also: Wayland. Or, on similar complexity level, global dark mode).
My most recent experience with this was updating the Raspberry Pi OS -- the latest version completely breaks RetroPi and I had to reinstall and revert.
Yes, and other than that the only non-workaroundable - but reasonable - break has been the removal of 32-bit x86 support. The PPC->Intel and Intel->ARM transitions had fully fledged and (at least in the latter case, didn't have a Mac at PPC time) high performant and fully functional runtime emulation/translation to ease it.
> Microsoft had a fully functional build of Windows 7 for ARM a long time ago.
That depends on your definition of "fully functional". Apple invests insane amounts of effort to tape out good hardware that isn't riddled with weird bugs and edge cases. They don't even publish much documentation, and yet not even a dozen people (iirc, please correct me if wrong) managed to reverse engineer enough to get support merged to Linux mainline.
In contrast, the utter bullshit that the rest of the ARM world dares call a CPU is so riddled with bugs that it's a nightmare even for the vendors to keep their custom kernel patches / BSPs up to date, and completely forget about ever upstreaming it to the Linux kernel. And now imagine someone has to write Windows drivers for all that buggy crap.
The completely sorry state of how the entire "embedded" world works is holding everyone back so immensely that it takes companies the size of Apple and Amazon to show that the problem isn't ARM itself - and unfortunately, Apple doesn't sell to anyone else and Amazon only makes server CPUs, which means there is zero market pressure, neither for a re-imagine of x86/64 without legacy crap in the instruction set and die, nor for anyone with an ARM license to tape out a SoC at above "barely works, fix the rest in software" quality and decent open source Linux and Windows drivers, nor is there much pressure on AMD/Intel to improve because as long as there is no quality competition from ARM they don't have to fear anyone else eating their lunch.
Sorry for the rant, this topic has annoyed me ever since I tried putting an at-the-time modern kernel to an at-the-time-current Mediatek based phone and miserably and utterly failed a decade-ish ago. And nowhere I have looked at in the embedded space since then has shown me any sign of improvement. To the contrary, even projects as popular as Raspberry Pi couldn't arse Broadcom enough to check if the PCIe implementation passed standards validation, they only cared if the USB (and iirc, wifi too) chipset worked. J F C
I don't know how modders manage to get Windows 10 working on Android phones without any source code yet they still somehow manage to get it running with various degrees of success:
https://www.xda-developers.com/renegade-project-boot-arm64-w...
And yet, I don't disagree with your rant. The entire "embedded" world is a bit of a mess when it comes to hardware and software. Apple can only do what they do because they manage most of it themselves. Now Microsoft can, and has, also done that to various degrees of success but they're still both hamstrung by their own strategic decisions and by the problems you've described because they're still outsourcing much more than Apple is.
The obvious solution is to leave those enterprise customers behind on the legacy edition of Windows and launching something new. But Microsoft seems incapable of going to market with something new also. They created Windows 10x, and then went and merged the new parts back into the legacy platform.
The most natural time to have done this would've probably been going from XP → Vista/7, which broke a number of old things anyway.
For all that switching mainline Windows over to the NT kernel in 2k/XP improved Windows, the benefit wasn't as great as it could've been if they'd been able to unshackle the OS from backwards compatibility with all the preceding Windows/DOS stuff.
Microsoft had a good thing going, with the massive success of MS-DOS and Windows 95 it was imperative that the next generation consumer OS, Windows 2000, could run programs from their existing well-respected platform without users noticing the gap. (With OS X, you noticed the gap -- totally different UI style when in Classic Environment, and the Carbon API for easy porting was a mess that went unadopted by developers)
Really, they could have done a lot better-- a VM jukebox with everything from DOS 3.3 onwards available could have made the "most compatible Windows ever"-- even old software that assumed a 4.77MHz CPU clock could have been rigged to run natively.
Well yeah, and we still don't see Linux on every corner (android excluded). Linux desktop is a joke. You can either pick DE whick breaks compatibility every now and then (Gnome, KDE, ...) or which has more or less stopped developing (Xfce). I understand, it is nicer developing new things than maintaining and evolving old codebases, but I don't think MS needs to worry about Linux in this segment. And I'm saying that as someone who actually prefers any Linux flavor to Windows.
And it's not just UI where Linux keeps evolving. Just look at systemd - a fucking breeze to work with, whereas on macOS you're stuck working with plist's (annoying but OK), and on Windows it's literally the same crap from 30 years ago in the NT era. A Linux VM can do a cold start in well under 30 seconds, Windows needs anything from five to ten minutes and you can't optimize anything.
Windows services can be configured with dependency order and with delayed start. There are startup profilers.
I've seen and resolved slow boot times in misconfigured domains and with features such as roaming profiles. It's probably DNS ;-)
Sorry, forgot to mention I'm talking about Windows servers. Desktop indeed has gone quite fast.
Windows should not be a Mac OS clone. But every single UI update sends it in that direction.
It was marketed as a "Zero New Features" update [0]. Only performance, reliability and back-end upgrades (and it was a packed release for sure that completed the 64 bit transition).
EDIT: Anyone who agrees, upvote this comment! Who knows maybe someone in Redmond will see it! You never know!
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/26/apple-work-looking-back-at-wh...
Well, they capitalized on their market share immencely with Azure. At the beginning it was pretty ****, but a lot of customers signed up immediately. Not because that **** is better, but because Microsoft already held all their eggs.
Windows is the linchpin in that strategy so I don't understand why they've moved organizationally moved it so far away. It's relegated to being Bing adjacent.
Yes - I’ve been wondering since win10 why Microsoft thinks the enterprise edition needs an xbox app preinstalled.
Looking back at the comment, yes, you are right. Both lines could share under the hood stuff, the NT/2000 line with clean UI and the ME line the colorized cartoon one. Or, they could split the line with Home and Pro, both of them they still have.
They really didn't.
Full disclosure: I installed Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 on a brand new laptop earlier today :)
For this specific device, my wish is a Windows-compatible OS that's going to shut up and stay out of the way, and it seems the LTSC variant of Win10 is the closest Microsoft are willing to provide at the moment.
That LTSC doesn't come with Edge, Cortana or the Windows Store, well that's just the icing on the cake.
Evidently not, considering there were 4 such releases. The earliest was on July 29, 2015, and the latest was on November 16, 2021 and will be supported until January 13, 2032.
Curious what they will do about Microsoft Store apps in such a release. It's becoming more of a pressing concern. Maybe Windows 11 LTSC will have a "filtered flathub" situation similar to Red Hat / Fedora?
In case MS marketing reads this thread: you can simply fix the outstanding, sore-thumb problems with your product in its own way and gain both types of customers. Instead of poorly mimicking something they never wanted in the first place.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
The more you make it like a Mac, the less barrier there is for a user to jump ship to a Mac. I wonder if any of the increase in Apple marketshare is due to Windows becoming more Mac-like.
Now…. When will they bring back the ability to park your taskbar vertically on the left hand side? Another 2 years?
Works very well on x64 though.
She forgets on Win quickly and probably never go back.
And literally every Windows user I personally know has turned them back on.
Personally, I like to have the labels with the icons because the icons all by themselves tend to be awful at signaling what applications they go with. Having labels means I can just click on what I want straight away without having to hunt through them first.
As a result modern Windows feels like a graveyard of old ideas and various phases of whatever UI seemed trendy at the time.
Why stop there? Lets go back to the Windows 7 Taskbar. I remember that being better than Windows 10.
I’d throw it out and rebuild it to make it reliable and defensive against broken applets.
Well, in Windows 10 there's at least 4 different styles of context-menu in the Taskbar depending on where you click - so given that, I'm guessing it's a bit of a mess.
1. Right-click the Start button or empty space on the Taskbar: Win32 (USER32?) standard menu, but with a custom dark background and extra menu-item padding to make them touch-friendly. Earlier versions of Windows 10 used standard white menus with no extra padding. Uses the standard Windows menu font (Segoe?).
2. Right-click a pinned program icon: Aero Glass-effect jumplist menu with very smooth opening animation (seems to be the same UI framework as the Start Menu itself). Uses the standard Windows menu font (Segoe?).
3. Right-click a jumplist item: an opaque sub-menu that uses a much larger font-size, and I think a different typeface too. If the jumplist menu item is a shell object then this context menu will contain some (but not all) of the registered custom shell-wide menu items as in File Explorer and other views.
4. Right-click a window thumbnail: you get the window-menu for that window, which (on my computer) uses the standard Windows grey background and different font-sizes and metrics to all the other menus.
5. Right-click a custom Rebar[1] / Toolbar control in the Taskbar (I think they removed this feature from Windows 11?): you'll get whatever custom menu the author of the Rebar control decided to use.
6. Right-click an icon in the ("system tray") notification area (as opposed to the Action Center): as with Custom Rebars the menu style you get depends on the application - though tellingly different built-in standard/system Windows icons have different menus, e.g. right-click "Safely remove hardware" gives you a grey menu, but right-click the Volume icon and you'll get a black menu.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/reb...
It’s barely a UI skin! It’s not even complete or self-consistent, and the original Win10 skin is still there under it, feature-complete. People noticed that certain boot failures of Win 11 bring back the original Win 10 look!
It’s basically a “Mac mod” for Windows made by a bunch of Apple users working within Microsoft.
I managed to do it by downloading the setup with wget and executing it with an uninstall flag, but that was really scary.
Glad I'll get taskbar labels and clock seconds back soon. <3
I'm using a bleeding-edge OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE and I've configured the taskbar and menu to pretty much the same think I have been using for over 10 years or more.
The 2 years delay shows how resource constrained the whole WinUI team is, and how far they are to reach feature parity with UWP, or raw Win32.
Plus the team behind Windows 10X had to do something (that is how Windows 11 came to be).
It certainly was a choice to ship it in a state where it was missing so many basic features, but as expected, they're gradually getting re-implemented
I only use ~any UI to launch a terminal, so I'm clearly not qualified to defend/defame anything. But you have to start over at some point. Was Win10 a clean slate implementation?
(Not supporting ungrouped one-click dock access to individual windows is one of the reasons I dislike using Mac OS...)
I was massively disappointed that Win 11 removed this as it made it so annoying to only have individual window access after hove. Actually turned off the TPM on my PC to prevent Windows update from pulling another one of those "forced upgrades" like they did for win10. Perhaps when this is out I will finally be OK with "upgrading" (hopefully the first-party ads also continue to be disable-able, that is)
All the browsers have the ability to open both windows and tabs. If I wanted stuff grouped in one taskbar item, I'd open a tab. If I've specifically opened a new window, I am specifically saying I don't want those grouped -- the OS applying its own grouping is obnoxious.
If all the apps I use had native executables, they'd appear as their own taskbar icon. If they were wrapped in an Electron app, I'd have essentially the same user experience but they'd get their own icon.
My point is really that combining windows/processes that happen to be hosted by the same executable is silly -- even as a highly technical user I don't care about that detail. I'm doing a semantically different activity; I specifically opened a new window; I want a dedicated taskbar icon for it.
I'd be curious: if "Always combine" wasn't actually the default, how many users would specifically turn it on? 50%? 5%? A fraction of 1%?
With a vertical Taskbar this is the only option, in my case.
You could put shortcuts in a folder somewhere, and them to the task bar as a quick launch toolbar. This would show each shortcut as a single-click launcher showing a small mini icon. You could then give the toolbar a name, and shrink it so every icon is hidden, which effectively turned it into a named menu.
I’d put all my game shortcuts in a folder, add it as a quick launch toolbar called “Games”, and it would basically give me a global menu to run a game whenever I wanted with 2 clicks.
I used this feature all the way from Windows 98 to Windows 10, until they finally broke it for no good reason in Windows 11.
Start menu in Win11 is dumbier.
Also, there's typically plenty of spare width and not much spare height, due to modern aspect ratios, so it's a win, anyway.
Also also, if you do the maths, the typical vertical taskbar can be significantly thicker and use no more screen area.
Not sure about your system but on both of mine by default it's over double the thickness of the horizontal taskbar when small icons are used.
> Also also, if you do the maths, the typical vertical taskbar can be significantly thicker and use no more screen area.
So I measured this on my system with a 2560x1440px monitor (16:9 being a typical aspect ratio). Horizontal taskbar total pixels: 76800. Vertical taskbar total pixels: 96480. Vertical orientation still objectively consumes more screen real estate, unless the 7+ Taskbar Tweaker mod is used.
A sibling comment mentions a user with an ultrawide though, which due to the sheer width I suppose is a scenario where the default vertical is smaller overall. Or perhaps if larger icons are used.
For large monitors though (27"+) the need for width is reduced… I've never used a 4:3 or 5:4 monitor that large but I don't think it'd bother me nearly as much as those aspect ratios at small sizes do.
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Personally I can't stand Large Icon mode in Windows 10 because in Windows 10 it takes the 32x32 icons then downscales them to 24x24, even if there's a 24x24 icon available (whereas Windows 7 and 8 always used the 32x32 icons). I will agree that 24x24 sized icons seem to visually fit better in the Taskbar but the crazy part is that Windows 10 always downscales the 32x32 icons which makes them look slightly blurry: it never uses 24x24 icons if they're available, which lead to Google Chrome's icon designers having to compromise the Chrome logo icon so it would look better when downscaled: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=526622... (see comment 16 and 26)
And then some whoever said "We need a brand new taskbar because our code is too complicated and it's hard to maintain! Those people who preferred the smaller taskbar? It's their loss. We can't afford the development time to support that legacy feature in our complete rewrite!"
Basically: When the next gen comes out, use the latest tech to miniaturize and make portable the previous gen.
Gamegear for the most part was a Sega Master System. The PSP for the most part was a Playstation 1. Both were released during a time where there was too many limitations to really fully utilize that prior catalog (see: GameGear SMS converter, which was HUGE, limited memory for downloading games onto PSP, no legal path for importing your PS1 library into the PSP from physical disks).
Imagine the market share Microsoft would have if they made an Xbox One or before that Xbox 360 portable, which could play your existing library using cloud saves.
This for example should have been a microsoft product:
Do like what Apple did for the 1st iPhone, cheap entry price with a 2 year Game Pass contract (or do like Valve and the steam deck, sell it at a loss, gamepass is the long term goal anyways), and eat the entire market share..
Windows, that's literally the biggest advantage they have over both Sony and Nintendo, yet they don't use it..
.. a giant library that spans decades
Software must follow to ensure proper UX, it's not there yet.. so they have double the amount of work to do..
If you miss those days, XBox and Azure business lines are the ones that matter nowadays.
I once used an older LTSC version for a virtual desktop fleet because it’s a lot better behaved at scale. You don’t want to use a “normal” release because Microsoft will randomly push a critical 4 gigabyte update… to Minecraft. When 60K VMs update at once on a single SAN array, it’s not pretty.
That, or Microsoft will randomly decide to install TikTok by default on virtual desktops used from terminals in operating theatres.
I had a Microsoft consultant review our system and I swear his report said “we don’t recommend LTSC, you should use Current Branch” at least fifteen times.
That’s when I realised that there was some serious KPI pressure within Microsoft to get users onto the full-telemetry, riddled-with-ads version.
Windows 10 UI is far more confusing than Windows 7, with the new and old configuration dialogs.
I don't care much, I just want good old Windows I am familiar with. For any but a very non-complex system, a revamped UI always feeld more confusing if you are an experienced user already.
> with the new and old configuration dialogs.
I just love the old and dread the day they will be removed.
Basically any change to Windows these days.
Windows 7 taskbar was great. Windows 10 added a few improvements. Windows 11 restarted from scratch for no reason whatsoever. I think they only way this happens is if nobody in the entire org has a cohesive vision for the product. It's every man for himself. Somebody wanted to implement a new taskbar from scratch, and they had enough pull within the company. So they got to do it. Users and product be dammed.
What I really want is the ability to categorize and separate out certain icons.
Like creating little groups. One for browsers, one for productivity, one for games, one for utilities, etc. That would be so amazing.
You can hack a way of doing it by creating an empty executable with an icon that looks like a divider, but that's just painful to do.
https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2021/06/microsoft-w...
It seems windows is bringing back text in the taskbar items, and exists in windows 10 (you get an icon and text in a rectangle), and allowing you to leave windows ungrouped which isn't currently possible.
HOORAY!! At least we won't have to suffer that particular torment.
I really have to wonder about the process the Windows team follows.