Hacker News Reader

Comment by Springtime | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft still haven't implemented a native vertical taskbar after all the years of it being in the top voted[1] request (part of the request to move to any side of the screen) and the fact it's been part of Windows for like 15 years. It's a dealbreaker tbh.

Third-party tools that restored the W10 taskbar in W11 allowed users to continue having a taskbar that's usable for them yet the latest W11 betas show they're removing that legacy code. It'd be fine if they were replacing it with an equivalent but they're not.

[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/ability-to-move-the-windows-11-t...

View on HN

It's because the Windows 11 UI was designed by people who've never used anything other that an Apple Mac.

Yes, Microsoft hires employees with zero Windows experience to design their operating system.

That's why the Windows 11 taskbar has the icons centred -- because Apple OSX does too.

That's why there's no way to drag the taskbar around -- because Apple OSX doesn't allow this either.

Etc...

You can move the Dock to the side of the screen and in fact many people do. What's the excuse for not copying that functionality?

this assumes the programmer knows how to change app settings; ive seen many a great programmers know quite little about the actual apps they install (or comes with) and use; dont even get me started about folks who "program" but simply just edit a file and dont use the actual app to test things (and instead rely on build-systems) - strange i must say, but it happens so much im not surprised by it, just forever saddened

I've seen my share of horror stories, but I'm also the type of idealist that believes the people whom a $3T corporation hires to work on one of its core products would know better. It's more than likely that ultimately the decision was not in the hands of a technical (or seemingly even a computer literate) person.

My Apple Mac OSX taskbar (sic) is to the left on my screen. Auto-hidden. Just like I keep my taskbar on my Windows-box.

Mine’s to the right. Also auto hidden.

I thought it was centered to better support ultra widescreen users

So they make it worse for everyone else to support a minority of users?

> That's why there's no way to drag the taskbar around -- because Apple OSX doesn't allow this either.

It does though.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp1119/mac

Apple allows to drag the taskbar “around”. Mine auto hides away, since I barely use it (I try to use the mouse as little as possible).

You're being downvoted on only 1/4 of the points you made, but the other 3/4 is true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

I've always been fascinated by forum up/down voting patterns. It's a lens onto human group behaviour.

I've said things that are totally wrong and been voted up, and said things that are essentially correct except for some tiny detail and been voted down into oblivion.

What especially gets people riled up is if there's an element of tribalism involved. Can be anything: text editors, political party, operating system, programming language, or whatever. You don't even have to be pro/anti any specific tribe. Just mentioning anything to do with such a topic gets people worked up and angry even if your point is strictly neutral or objective.

It's always fun to watch this play out in the microcosm of some obscure topic...

Apple and Microsoft are competing on who can make the worst UX in the desktop arena. Window management is so bad in osx and I refuse to pay for add-ons to make things slightly better when Linux and the small galaxy of window managers have been doing it so well, and for free, for literally decades.

Are you always using full screen apps? If you are, yeah it’s bad. If you got a big enough screen, know the shortcuts, and you are not using full screen apps, macOS is untouchable.

I recently got a m3 macbook pro (mainly because the general notebook market has been shit for a decade now, I needed to replace my more than a decade old one, and there's pretty much nothing apart from apple which is relatively small, has long battery life, a shitload of RAM and a powerful CPU).

Once there's Linux support for M3 I'll probably switch (have an M1 macbook air with Linux which is doing well) - until then I got things close enough to my Linux Hyprland setup with yabai that it is relatively painfree to use.

Designers don’t make things based on their experience with the product.

They do research, evaluate multiple variations, get buy in from stakeholders and then AB test the final result.

It’s definitely not as simple as let’s do this because I saw it somewhere before.

Icons in the middle of a task bar is objectively, measurably less user-friendly than left aligned icons.

With the standard Windows layout users can develop “muscle memory”, especially for the bottom left corner of the screen — which is very easy to hit with a mouse because the edges of the screen “trap” the cursor.

With middle aligned icons, every new app shifts the existing icons.

Also there is no icon in an easy to hit location.

Windows 11 has some other design elements that broke Microsoft’s own integrations. As a random example: “Open with VS Code” and “Terminal here” are hidden submenus now.

Funny, how many GNU/Linux desktop environments allow you to do that easily, while being developed by a handful of people, while MS has probably hordes of people working on the UI of Windows. They just don't seem to get it or have complelety incapable UI/UX designers or something.

Every configuration option is a support burden. I say tihs as a KDE user who installed Gnome for the parents.

So how come, that far fewer people can role out such a feature easily, while MS cannot? "No need to offer support." I hear you say, but is that really it? If the feature just works well, because it has been developed well, and does not cause many if any support cases, then that point would be invalid. Lets take for example XFCE panels. I can stick them wherever I like. If there is a problem, then it is with panels themselves, not with their position. And for things like deskbar mode I can write a wiki article and point people to that.

I think support shouldn't be such an issue, if things are well done. And of course you can always have less-power users, who will have some issue. But they will have issues anyway, if not with a deskbar kind of thing, then with some other thing. Should MS therefore strip their OS of all features? It seems ridiculous. Why not release a "Windows for computer illiterate" version then and keep a capable version?

I'd be fine with it being part of Powertoys.

Let's be real, MS doesn't give a flying flip about support. They use their customers as alpha and beta testers. It has been a few years, but the last time I used Premium Support it was a miserable experience. The agents knew about as much as I did and wasted my time waiting around for a call backs that solved nothing. They don't care. I would hang my head in shame to be associated with such a rotten organization like MS. I don't know how some of those folks sleep at night working for MS.

I get that but if so many people want it then why isn’t the improvement to their lives with the additional support cost?

It's because Microsoft has OKRs to hit that have nothing to do with UI customizability or even giving users what they want.

I realized this in the 90s. Windows 9x, theoretically, should never have existed. I knew this because a DOS subsystem with great speed and compatibility, DOSEMU, existed for Linux. You could play Doom with sound at full speed in DOSEMU on contemporary Pentium hardware. If the open source community could do that, Microsoft, the developers of DOS, could develop a DOS layer for Windows NT that was much better than the sluggish, feature-incomplete layer they did ship. But they didn't prioritize the effort it would take to do so, especially since dividing the Win32 ecosystem into 9x, NT workstation and NT server allowed binning of different Windows versions at different price points.

Windows 9x was significantly lower in resource requirements than NT (mostly from memory, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0#System_requirem... seems to agree). I'd 100% believe that MS was going for market segmentation, but I don't think it was just leaving out DOS compat.

This is complete insanity that vertical task bar is still not implemented, pretty much what OS has to do - manage memory, manage processes/threads, manage windows to enable smooth UX with multiple programs. It more and more fails on the last one. Seems the policies have changed to drop support for everything that is used for example less than 1% of users, (just neglecting 10 million users, costing likely billions $ time and sweat for those users, nbd). Even if it would cost MS like tow part time developers time/money.

It is such a neccessary multitasking functionality on work environments that I'm quite lost when Win 10 support ends and the alternative taskbar tools do not work reliably then. Small hope that Windows 12 or whatever comes next would be the better one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com