Windows 11 is getting a force quit option to close apps without the Task Manager | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 is getting a force quit option to close apps without the Task Manager

theverge.com

60 pointsthunderbong77 comments

If the task manager hadn't gone from guaranteed to pop up instantly if the machine wasn't hard frozen to taking over a minute to become usable when the machine is under moderately high load over the past ten years, this would be a less necessary feature

Here's a fascinating post by it's author detailing so many cool aspects of it. I hope they've ported his work over in the new task manager.

https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote...

Of note, check out PowerToys from the app store; it has a number of experimental features of this class.

List here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

This has always been one of my favorite Windows extras—glad to see it continually get updated over the years.

I appreciate how they seem to be trying out new features and UX changes more often with Windows 11. Not always good, but it feels like some life is being injected back into Windows

This is the kind of self-aware innovation people actually want from microsoft

Calling a force quit function innovation is generous, but yes, this is a good feature

I get that they are trying to Apple-ize, but 11 took away the ability to right-click in the empty taskbar to open Task Manager

They must have added it back, for me right clicking in the empty taskbar brings up a menu with the options "Taskbar Settings" and "Task Manager".

Guess that must've been a recent change - I see the same on 22621.1778

September article about it reappearing in Insider Preview:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-fi...

Providing an option to the average user that will immediately kill an application and lose all unsaved data seems like a terrible idea. Are apps so prone to freezing that they require terminating on a daily basis? I can't even remember the last time I had to End Task a desktop application.

You're probably using a high-end machine, many people use sub-$500 Windows laptops

If these events are as uncommon as you think they are - and I am certainly not dealing with them on anything close to a daily basis - then this option is not likely to be used often, and then usually only when unsaved data loss is already inevitable.

Sadly, freezing remains a fairly common situation under Windows, even with apps built entirely with MS tech.

- Your app is network-heavy and the internet goes down -> freezing

- Your app accepts uploaded files and the user tries to load something bigger than the app would expect -> freezing

- Your app is supposed to perform some sort of calculation with terrible code provided by user -> freezing

- Your app interacts with some sort of device (printers, scanners...), and a cable is yanked or the firmware is dubious -> freezing

- Your app runs smoothly on developers' desktops with 16GB of RAM and all the latest patches, but actual users deploy it on a 4GB laptop the company bought in 2010 (because "it does email and Word just fine") -> freezing

Etc etc

Tbf, over 25 years we've gone from "bad situation on Windows requires a hard reboot" to "bad situation on Windows requires forced killing", and it's more difficult for apps to step on each other's DLL-shaped toes. But yes, freezes and crashes continue to be an everyday situation for many - which is why the first thing Office applications do, when starting, is to check for possible leftovers of a crash.

Most freezing situations are blocking the UI thread, which should already be handled by the "Not Responding" dialog. I can't think of many cases where you'd want to terminate an application that isn't frozen instead of exiting it normally.

> should already be handled by the "Not Responding" dialog

"Should" being the keyword there. That dialog comes up fairly rarely in my experience, and only after waiting a very, very long time.

As a Visual Studio user, I have to force-kill it all the time.

I've come to loathe the VS experience; I used to love it but it really feels like it's been left behind to rot.

Windows development guideline states that the app should always be ready for that.

That's because the close button on Modern Apps, unlike Win32 old apps, always did force quitting.

That's why with Windows Modern apps, there isn't the popup for "Do you want to save the changes?". Because the guideline states that the app should always save changes automatically (Since 2013 there's proper APIs to store these data, and it even sync with your other PCs).

I feel like this is 20 years too late.

Do Windows users still frequently force quit their applications?

I do it at least once a week between my work and personal machines.

I just click the X

That works most of the time. But sometimes you get something with more than one thread and windows will keep the application around but the foreground window is destroyed. Programmatically in win32 windows and the process are two different things. The user will not see it that way though. Task manager usually can take it out. But every once and awhile it will still get stuck depending on the resources the application has created. At that point you can pull out pskill from ms sysinternals or just reboot.

I do, probably once per week or so.

Yup, pretty frequently, mainly outlook or a browser.

Rarely but it does still happen typically when I'm gaming.

Ever since Windows 11 MS really seems to be keen on making the taskbar more docklike… this is another step in that direction (OS X has had force quit in its dock icon context menus for something like 20 years at this point).

I don’t particularly mind because I’ve never been fully sold on the Win9X style desktop paradigm, but I think MS may be making a mistake by cherry-picking bits of macOS UX and removing them from the context that makes them work. It’s probably not a recipe that’s likely to please longtime Windows users.

> MS really seems to be keen on making the taskbar more docklike

I don't think the docklike push comes from the top.

I bet all UI designers at MS use Macs, and probably think they are superior to Windows.

Macs don't even support alt+tab to tab between different windows as a stack correctly, this can never be superior.

NOTE: I don't use windows but linux, with desktops that are windows-like.

In my case, to get alt+tab to work correctly on Mac, there is a program called AltTab, it is amazing and lets us achieve Windows-like alt-tab behavior

"Work correctly" is strong. They're different philosophies, and not everyone agrees that window-oriented switching is better than application-oriented.

Your sibling comment prefers macOS's behaviour, and so do I. It took me a while to get used to it, but now I find Windows annoying when I have to use it.

I think that's a matter of one's workflow and what they're used to. On Windows and winlike desktops, the lack of logical grouping of windows by application (outside of maybe combining taskbar buttons) drives me crazy, and I find that alt-tab switching windows instead of apps becomes unusable past ~5 windows open.

I’ve used Mac’s at my job for about 10 years + a few years of personal use before that. I’ve had ample time to get used to the Mac workflow.

macOS’s approach only works nicely if you expect to have one simultaneous task per app OR you don’t expect to switch between apps. Once you have multiple simultaneous tasks in multiple apps, it becomes really cumbersome to use command tab. My job tends to involve exactly the pattern of window switching that macOS isn’t made for.

I've been using two monitors for a long time at this point, which might be part of why the macOS workflow works for me. I make heavy usage of virtual desktops, with "primary" apps going on desktops on the main monitor and secondary/auxiliary apps going on the secondary monitor. With this I can mix and match entire sets of windows very quickly and efficiently and very rarely manually manage windows.

I dislike Apple's dock entirely, and think bringing it to Windows (whether cherry-picked aspects or just the whole hog) would be very irritating.

I don't think Microsoft's motivations are to be more Mac-like, more likely convergent design driven by their desire to sell Windows on a variety of different device form factors.

Something I noticed immediately when using Windows 11 was how much more comfortable the centered taskbar actually is on wide screens. I had used macOS before, but only on laptops where the smaller screen size (and larger proportions of macOS's dock) made this benefit less apparent. I ended up replicating this style in my KDE setups.

It seems to me that the age of 32" wide monitors, corners aren't nearly as important as they were back when we were all looking at 9" 512x342 screens.

One of the things that led me to leave Windows for MacOS is that force quit actually works on the Mac, every single time.

On windows I found getting tasks to actually quit was always unreliable, often they’d hang around even after sending multiple force quit requests.

Recently I tried windows again thinking this might have been fixed, but it’s still as unreliable as ever.

On Windows, macOS, Linux, and likely many others, this is a universal issue as some requests cannot be killed/cancelled [immediately]. For example:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5642/what-if-kill-9...

I've seen the spinning beach ball of death enough times to refute this :)

Is it going to be genuinely effective? I've noticed over the years Task Manager has gotten worse and worse at closing anything that's actually bugged or frozen. There are some programs now I don't even bother trying to kill anymore when they freeze, I just reboot.

Is there anything compelling in Windows 11 that would make me want to switch from Windows 10?

^ you can force quit without calling task manager :)

Autohdr is pretty good.

Main reason I know of is having a new CPU with separate P/E cores. The Windows 10 scheduler assumes all cores are identical in performance.

So the new P CPUs like i7-1260p etc. are not going to be effective on Win 10?

It will run but you won't get the full benefits of the split between performance and efficiency cores.

Looks like I was a bit wrong in my earlier comment, they have recently updated Windows 10 to support the concept of P/E core differences, but the way they assign processes to specific cores in Win10 is very unsophisticated compared to Win11.

Windows 11 task scheduler talks directly to the Thread Director, a microcontroller added added on gen 12+ CPUs, while Windows 10 scheduler was modified after release to account for them through collaboration with Intel.

According to both MS and Intel, thread scheduling on 10 is not as optimized as on Win 11.

According to benchmarks (typically games), performance is roughly the same. Most wins go to Windows 11, some to Windows 10, but within negligible ranges of difference to where it doesn't matter on either. That was reason enough to stick with Windows 10 on my 13600k i5 build still.

Has anyone been able to come up with a real-world benchmark showing a performance difference? My understanding is that the effect of the new scheduler is almost unnoticeable.

In any event, no new OS features are worth dealing with nonconsensual ads popping up whenever I move the mouse the wrong way.

the Win+. emoji/special characters board is substantially less usable. this has been my only, yet biggest gripe so far. it was nice to be able to hit Win+. then type "heart" and get, y'know, the heart emoji, to send my wife—no idea how the Windows 11 one shipped given how unusable it is.

For specific emoji, and other characters/sequences, you use regularly you could use something like WinCompose (other compose key tools exist, this seemed to be the best of them at the time I was last looking) to setup shortcuts.

You don't get the search functionality though, so it is not useful for first time use of a character or discovering “new” ones.

The new Snap Layouts feature is quite good. One of the best recent features IMO, just very simple+functional window management.

Is the difference from PowerToys FancyZones[0] enough to justify updating?

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...

Not really. It’s nice to have it built-in with a very polished UX, but FancyZones is more powerful.

No, FancyZones is much better. Probably the best window manager across all operating systems in my opinion. I wish it was on MacOS

Per recent announcement, Windows 11 is going to have Windows Copilot. Windows 10 - I doubt it. This alone is convincing enough to me - and it's also the only reason I'm considering downgrading my Windows from 10 to 11.

Considering how miserably bad GPT is at writing Powershell scripts to perform functions in Windows, I wouldn't hold your breath on it being truly useful.

Forget code. This is not the Github Copilot, aka. ol' completion model powered autocomplete. I'm talking about Windows Copilot, i.e. something more like Bing Chat, except it's fully, deeply integrated with the OS. See the demo video. It's not meant for techies like us to ask it to write PS scripts for us. It's for any user to be able to ask "how the fsck can i make the text smaller?", or "where the fsck did my document go?", or "what the fsck am I even looking at?", and the Copilot is supposed to tweak relevant system settings for you, find and arrange windows, summarize or edit documents you have opened - and suggest what software you could use or install (this is where monetization will enter the picture) to do the thing you asked it how to do.

(Also, I found GPT-3.5 helpful with PowerShell; didn't have a reason to try out GPT-4 on PS yet).

Copilot is supposed to tweak relevant system settings for you

That was my issue. I don't know whether ChatGPT was giving me instructions for the wrong version of Windows or just hallucinating solutions, but things as simple as "Can I write a script that, when run by a shortcut, toggles the desktop screen resolution between 3840x2160 and 1920x1080" and the output doesn't work. Then you tell it it doesn't work and it does it entirely differently, and that doesn't work either. If ChatGPT has no idea whether what it says works, will Windows Copilot? I have my doubts.

> something more like Bing Chat, except it's fully, deeply integrated with the OS.

That's even worse.

Developers should appreciate the upcoming Dev Drive [0] feature which allows you to disable many of the file system filters, thus improving performance for large repos.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

Some things that have caught my attention & made me buy a 2nd hard drive to eventually get around to installing v11 & dual booting. I don't trust 11 based on what I've heard from friends, colleagues & Microsoft's multi-decade track record of rotating between a solid OS & experimental OS not ready for production.

* Dev Drive - faster partition of your drive made specifically for software dev work. Also attempting to create a nice widget screen for GitHub & others.

* Apple iMessage Connection - Ability to send messages from your Apple phone. I've heard this is missing a lot of necessary features though & is really 1/4 baked. A lot of that may be due to Apple more than Microsoft.

* Live captions - haven't tried it but sounds like Windows 11 will create captions off any audio played, even offline. I love Edge's read aloud mode & reader mode. Windows is winning the accessibility game in my opinion & I'm not a person that requires these to function. They just improve my life. Another accessibility feature is voice typing via a shortcut. I probably won't use this often but nice to see & may come in handy on a laptop for me.

* Android Apps - haven't tried it but sounds like Android apps work in Windows now.

* Different backgrounds on virtual desktops. I'm hoping there is other improvements to virtual desktops. I'm a huge user & I rarely see the background but I'm glad to hear they're dedicating time here.

* Test the different AI features they come up with.

Better memory management. Seems to be handling the same workload with less swapping than window 10. Did an in place upgrade so my workflow and setup was exactly the same.

I like the new aesthetic a lot and I like how the Settings pages were redone.

I don't like how there is two right click menus - feels half baked. Just include one or the other, why is there both.

There's nothing in 11 that makes it compelling to me, and there are a few things that make it worse. In other words, it's pretty much like most other Windows updates of late.

Your mileage may vary, of course. There are new features that might be of value to you.

Today in "that wasn't a thing? how do you people use this pile of crap?".

I wonder if this is laying the groundwork for the removal of task manager and on system or Microsoft apps the option for force quit will not be available.

It'd be odd for them to still be adding so much to task manager with the plan to remove it but I guess weirder things have happened. In regards to force quit to not be available to certain system apps, this is already the case in task manager today. Right now it's focused on "if you kill these the system will crash" type PIDs, but there is no need for Microsoft to make a separate interface to be able to extend this to more applications.

Not denying they have more in store with this move, but as is they are currently copying the competition. On MacOS if an app ever hangs you get the 'force quit' option by right clicking the app on your toolbar. I use it all the time for Teams, funnily enough.

This might be a believable theory if they hadn't just barely finished a complete redesign of the task manager.

But even then it's a stretch. Windows does not have the stranglehold on the market it once did. Making Windows a closed system would kill its biggest remaining selling point. Microsoft is very aware of this.

How about removal from Windows 11 Home, available in Windows Pro. To me it feels like a move towards Android where there is no task manager, apps can start themselves at boot, and little ability to easily manage what is happening on your own device. I hope not.

Apple says hello.

With the push to add AI to every corner of Windows, it seems like the Windows team at Microsoft has been re-invigorated. It's nice to see Microsoft chip away at longstanding issues and not just treat Windows as end-of-life.

It's about time. Long, long overdue, actually.

wow only took them 30 years

Wow, this is absurd. That people have sort of collectively accepted this level of lack of control over the machines in front of your face is just kind of mind-boggling to me.

Huh? This feature makes it easier to force quit applications, something you could always do. There's no change in the amount of control you have over your machine.

Mac OS has had force quit for many years and desktop/workstation UNIXes have had "kill -9" for longer than that.

To specify, I mean, that this reads as a "new feature"

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