[jackewiehose]

There is an interview with Raymond Chen where he is trying to defend the reason why they crippled the taskbar with Windows 11 [1].

Watching that I was just thinking NO NO NO - it worked fine for the last 25 years and there can be absolutely no reason why they had to destroy the taskbar now.

He deserves every headache he gets with these support requests.

Or to quote this comment of the linked article:

> There wouldn’t be as much of a need if the windows shell team was smarter [...] In fact I actively encourage, support, and celebrate efforts like this. Make their life hell and delay them. If they spend more time on investigating issues like this, they’ll have less time to f*k something else up.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDicLHBvQQM

[daemin]

Unfortunately it's the designers that are screwing up the UI/UX of Windows, not the programmers. If you give more time to the designers then you're just going to get more of a clone of OSX rather than something useful.

[WorldMaker]

The OSX dock has almost always supported vertical orientations, nearly as long as the Windows taskbar used to. If they are trying to clone OSX they are doing a miserable job at it in their choices of features to cut.

[jonhohle]

I don’t use windows often, but I was using it to check some hardware the other day and had to dig through nests of settings to get back to back to what was more or less the display settings screen from the Windows 9x/NT era, albeit with a less efficient layout and lots of superfluous white space.

Unfortunately, macOS has gone this direction as well and it’s settings have become inscrutable. Simple things like using drag and drop to reorder network interface priorities are luxuries of the past. It seems like those designing have never used them and never plan to.

[Drakim]

All the while they use OSX themselves and don't feel any of the pain of their half-baked copy.

[surajrmal]

Watching the clip, the improvements he's talking about are great and very welcomed. Is this a case of any change being considered bad because you're used to how things are?

[daemin]

Only supporting grouped taskbar icons is a big inconvenience when actually trying to do work. Instead of clicking directly on the taskbar item which corresponds to the window you want to access it requires that you hover over the icon, then try to pick out the window you want from a very small thumbnail of it. This just adds extra time and unnecessary thought into this process. It's also quite bizarre given that wide monitors are more normal these days with plenty of space to have a long taskbar with many items on it, but instead you only get some short icons in the centre.

This may have been fixed in recent versions where they finally added the ability to change the taskbar grouping in the settings, but I haven't felt the need to test it.

Also the new start menu is a pain in the ass as the quick launch area is just an alphabetic list of applications and/or documents with no ability to group them in any other way. In Windows 10 you can group related applications together and have quick access to "secondary" applications that you might want to use. (I pin "primary" applications to the taskbar and pretty much always have them running anyway). To get to all applications there's another click where as in Windows 10 you just start scrolling as they're just there (maybe that's an option I enabled but it works well).

Those are the two general gripes I have with the new taskbar and start menu in Windows 11. Maybe I'm used to my setup in Windows 10 but I didn't see anything wrong with the way things were from a design perspective. So the change seems kind of arbitrary just to make it look more like OSX rather than from any functional perspective.

One point that I think more technical folks should consider is if we are actively harming our desires to have a functional UI design by disabling telemetry. As that tells the people at Microsoft what features people actually use, and if they only get telemetry from non-power users then they're going to prioritise for them and remove "unused" features that us technical folks use all the time.

[TremendousJudge]

>This may have been fixed in recent versions where they finally added the ability to change the taskbar grouping in the settings, but I haven't felt the need to test it.

THANK YOU. I never heard about this, I had completely given up on using the taskbar for anything except the system tray.

I agree to the rest of your points -- I only use the start menu to search for stuff now. The pinned icons take up way too much space and even though I spent some time carefully curating them I never seem to want to use them.

You didn't mention the system tray, but I want to add that the redesign also made it worse than in Win10. The volume, battery, wifi, etc icons are joined into one button but actually if you right click they are three different buttons still. This is awful design, the fact that you have different options depending on where you right click is not communicated at all.

[daemin]

I think it was 23H1 or 23H2 update that added the taskbar grouping option back.

I've also not used Windows 11 in many months so I've probably forgotten a few other annoyances.

[jackewiehose]

This isn't about "change", they just removed some essential functionality that I use daily since 1995.

Besides from being used to it, it is also required for my work to have wide, labeled, ungrouped application buttons instead of icons that are oftentimes barely distinguishable.

[kmeisthax]

https://xkcd.com/1172/

[bluecalm]

I wouldn't say it worked "fine" for 25 years. It's still there all the time taking screen space. You can hide it but it will re-appear if you move your mouse to the now cleared screen real estate. The reason I need taskbar hacks is that I want one feature they never added: hide the taskbar permanently until I explicitly ask to see it (for example by pressing a Windows Key). For me it doesn't matter much if the taskbar is horizontal, vertical or goes through the screen diagonally. Just let me hide it and keep it hidden. I am ok with full screen taskbar as long as it only appears when I ask it to. I see not adding this obvious feature as manifestation of "you will have it our way and you will like it" attitude of Windows UI team (or whoever is responsible for it).

To add a bit to this rant, here is a script that mostly solves the problem: https://github.com/CrypticButter/ButteryTaskbar

It isn't 100% reliable but it's good enough for me. Now I hope to find something that prevents Windows 11 from dimming my screen when on battery after a few seconds of inactivity. Pretty please?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> I see not adding this obvious feature as manifestation of "you will have it our way and you will like it" a

Their corporate customers demand that your multi-use computer be turned into a nearly-dumb appliance with no configurability. It sucks for you, but you'll just have to suffer for the "greater good". Power users are not just an endangered species, but rather a dangerous enemy to be wiped out through any means necessary. They hate you, and you either need to be subjugated or forced to use an abacus.

[layer8]

Maybe this works better for you: https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=371022#p37...

The nice thing on Windows is that the UI can be uniformly manipulated that way.

[userbinator]

where he is trying to defend the reason why they crippled the taskbar with Windows 11

Do you have a timestamp? I'd rather not watch a 2h long video, even at 2x speed.

[jackewiehose]

You get a tool tip when hovering the mouse over the progress bar. But now I see the chapters are also listed in the video description, which I should have linked to in the first place:

00:30:35 Taskbar grouping https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDicLHBvQQM&t=1835s

[red_trumpet]

At ~0:30:30 he talks about taskbar grouping, so I guess that would be the correct place to look at?

[stronglikedan]

Not being able to drag items onto the taskbar is the reason that I refuse to "upgrade".

[dist-epoch]

If you are talking about button grouping, Windows 11 has an option now to un-group and label the buttons.

Also, "crippled", "destroyed", quite some heavy words. 99.9% of users don't care.

[mauvia]

Hey is there a particular timestamp for the taskbar specifically? I'm interested in what he'd say about it.