[aunty_helen]

I don't get this start button hate. For all the benefits of having a permanent start bar I will happily sacrifice 13mm off the bottom of my screen that I would probably just use as white space anyway.

And I have had the option to auto-hide the start bar since... Win 95?(or was it earlier)

[BruceIV]

It's not that they got rid of the taskbar (it's still there on the Win8 desktop), it's that they took the button for the start menu off of it, and replaced it with a hot corner, and in Windows 8.1 they've put the button back.