Amazing, only 2 years to implement a feature you had already. What was so problematic about the Windows 10 taskbar that they had to completely scrap it and start from zero??
Guess: Designer-minded Windows execs were hell-bent on moving to a macOS-like taskbar for years. Height, item count and behaviour is massively different wether you simply have icons or "legacy" long rectangles with text. They successfully persuaded engineering to not have this big UX gap for such a crucial part of the interface so they axed labels. Now after 1.5 years and lackluster adoption they got enough bad feedback to revert this.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> at the same time, desktop Linux distributions and macOS keep iterating and innovating without having that burden.
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.
"Linux" is harder to define. Are we talking about the kernel, the console user-land, desktop environment?
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.
> 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.
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
> And now imagine someone has to write Windows drivers for all that buggy crap.
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:
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.
This doesn't say much about whether it has great compatibility or not. Yes, there was a continuum of development releases between NeXT and OS X, but how easy is porting?
> 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 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.
It's strange that MS has never did what Apple did with the OS 9 → OS X transition, starting with a fresh foundation and making a clean break from the predecessor by way of a well-integrated "Classic" mode that seamlessly runs legacy applications in a "borderless" VM.
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.
Keep in mind that Apple didn't have much to lose, in the years leading up to OS X they were scrambling for market share lost to Windows 95, and already in a frenzy over a failed modernization attempt (Copland) that was intending to maintain backwards compatibility. They were truly desperate, on the verge of going bankrupt under a "corporate rehabilitator" CEO with no Steve Jobs in sight.
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)
Windows 7 had that "XP Mode" feature where it would try to run things in a VM, but it was an unloved stepchild.
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.
> - 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,...
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.
The thing is, the Linux space at least has something nice and shiny to offer every now and then (although I'd say GTK and Gnome could go off and vanish and I wouldn't care).
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.
The problem with pleasing old costumers is that you might fail to gain new customers. Microsoft is mostly conservative with its OS, while Apple is not afraid to cut off features it consideres outdated. And the MacOS market share has increased strongly over the last ~20 years.
The problem with Microsoft always looking to their competition for ideas is the fail to capitalize on their own strengths. They end up chasing Mac OS or Android and create a product that isn't as good as either of those (because chasing the competition is hard) while subsequently throwing away what made their own product competitive and interesting.
Windows should not be a Mac OS clone. But every single UI update sends it in that direction.
Windows should clone one particular release of OS X: Snow Leopard.
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!
The most popular versions of Windows -- 7 and 10 -- are both pretty low-feature releases. Windows 7 was just the completed version of Vista. Windows 10 was a bit of rollback of some of the worst UI ideas in 8. Neither were radical departures from the version before.
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.
Microsoft is securing their position with Azure. It definitely keeps getting better in ways that work well for their customers.
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.
You can solve this problem with branding. Have a "Windows OS Bleeding Edge" brand that changes regularly. Have "Windows OS LTS" brand that changes less often.
Or just have two Desktop Environments. One for the hoi polloi where the designers can go wild and the bean counters can push MSN "news", and one for Enterprise/Professionals that is more or less "Classic".
Only very rich corporations like FOSS community can simultaneously support two DEs (especially when one of them never changes too much). Microsoft has neither budget nor enough staff for that.
No NT4 is of the same lineage as 2000. I was referring to the other lineage of Windows with ME being the last one. The unification that XP provided was good for stability, but the eventual result is this whole Windows 11 ordeal.
I meant the UI; NT4 and 2000 were the nice and clean ones, for enterprise and professionals; ME had already first signs of the cartoon world, that XP continued on.
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.
> [..] Windows 10 LTSC. And killed it off quite qucikly
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.
It hasn't been killed off. Microsoft has confirmed publicly that Windows 11 will have an LTSC release.
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?
The problem with pleasing new costumers is that you might fail to gain old customers.
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.
I don't know where you got your numbers from but they don't appear to be correct. According to this, MacOS is around 16% while Windows is somewhere around 70%
Yeah, the worldwide data seems more relevant. Still, if you look at it, apparently Windows has lost more than 5 percentage points just in the last three months. It seems to be a historical low. I don't know what triggered this, but at least in the US, Windows seems to be on its way out. Though it could have also to do with Apple's very efficient M CPUs, which aren't available for Windows, not just with MacOS itself.
> I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook
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.
I've been using valinet/ExplorerPatcher on Win11 for a bit just to bring back all the old Win10 taskbar stuff. I know we should even need this, but I hope this is helpful.
+1 for startallback
I just paid them $5 this morning and I couldn't be happier. I am able to have my taskbars exactly how I want them. The productivity gain has paid for itself many times over.
I ended up picking Fedora too because I thought KDE Plasma and Fedora would be easy, stable, and up-to-date enough. There hasn't been much issue so far. I really wanted to go NixOS like I run to make it reproducible, but the casual user ergonomics would be too difficult. :(
Well, they didn't scrap it and start from zero... at least the labels were already disabled in Windows 7 by default, and more than 10 years later they thought it would be safe to remove them completely, but looks like they were wrong. Personally, the Windows 7-style task bar (icons only and combining quick launch icons with the task bar) was one of the few innovations (yeah, I know it was heavily inspired by MacOS) that I actually liked about newer Windows versions. I even carried it over to KDE by using the "Icons-only task manager".
Ok... I can sympathize with wanting to keep the old UI (I installed the "Classic Start Menu" under Windows 7 too), but I like the icons-only taskbar better than the old one. I use Alt+Tab to switch between apps, so I see the window titles there, I don't need them taking up valuable space in the taskbar. The taskbar is there to launch apps and see at a glance what apps are currently open.
Sure, different people have different needs. That's why options are good.
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.
They had a huge failure with Surface Neo and the OS (and the taskbar/start menu) they were making for it Windows 10x. After Neo was cancelled they tried to retool 10x for ordinary laptops. After that failed they took the crappy start/taskbar meant for dual screen/one app per screen devices, slapped it on top of latest insider version of Windows 10, introduced arbitrary cpu cutoff (so essentially screwing a large part of Windows insiders) and called it Windows 11.
There's some truth to this -- it's 100% the taskbar from 10X, but there's a lot of other changes for 11 (settings, taskbar stuff like volume controller, file explorer). Secondary goal was probably to decouple/undock the taskbar from the main OS which would require rebuilding some parts.
It's the Microsoft way. They have this strange duality of always redesigning UIs(see literally every major version of Windows) but also being obsessive about backwards compatibility, so all the cruft and even UIs of previous iterations are all buried in there somehow.
As a result modern Windows feels like a graveyard of old ideas and various phases of whatever UI seemed trendy at the time.
I don’t know if they actually changed this but the Windows 10 Start Menu is a fragile bricolage of applets and plugins that breaks all the time which is just not suitable for such an important part.
I’d throw it out and rebuild it to make it reliable and defensive against broken applets.
That's something I was genuinely wondering, how bad was the win10 task bar codebase because as i understand it the win11 is a completely new program so they have to keep reimplementing features they already had.
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.
But is this fixed in win11? From what others tell me the win11 is actually just another skin on the same code. You can still find plenty of UI styles from previous windows in win11
Most of Windows 11 is indeed just a reskin, however the taskbar has been completely rewritten and isn't coupled to explorer.exe anymore, being it's own WinUI application.
Oh, that's nice. explorer.exe crashing and taking out the taskbar is common enough for me to just sigh when it happens (and then launch the task manager via ctrl+shift+esc). I'm not sure if that's a Windows issue, or corporate malware issue, but maybe that'd mitigate it.
Win11 uses a new taskbar and start-menu that was originally never intended for desktop use: it was for a phablet UI for "Windows X" - which got killed-off and the code ported over to the main Windows codebase. I have no idea why.
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.
Ironically, one of the qualities of the Mac is the consistency of the interface styling and UX irrespective of how specifically the task bar works, while Microsoft just keep adding layer on top of layer so that depending on which bit of the system you are in you get UI styles ranging from win11 through win2000 (plus, if you dig, a whole bunch of pixel art icons from win98).
In this case it's a good thing. I used to use a piece of software called ExplorerPatcher but, as with nearly all patchers, it has the possibility to break after an update, as it did, causing Explorer to get stuck in a crash loop while I tried to figure out how to uninstall the thing without any access to the file explorer (or the start menu to find anything else to run). I didn't remember Control Panel was control.exe.
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 remember the exact same thing on Windows 8, and having to install Classic Start, which emulated the windows 7 taskbar/menu. Every couple of years they go all "Lawnmower Man", nobody wants it, and they go back to the boring thing that everybody was happy with.
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.
No one besides WinDev cares anylonger about WinRT/WinUI, so WinDev has starting to re-implement the Windows shell in WinUI to prove that they still care about WinRT and WinUI.
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).
Charitably: sometimes you just have to rebuild something. Tech debt, design debt, whatever else. I don't know if they "had to" in this case, but it's plausible
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
The taskbar wasn't just the "Windows 10 taskbar". It's pretty much had code left over from Win95 and just was continually built on top of. It desperately needed a rewrite from scratch.
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?
Coming here to say this too. Having each window correspond to a button on the task bar is crucial for my workflow as I use individual windows as one layer of grouping for the eventual tabs in those windows.
(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)
A huge portion of "applications" I use on my computer happen to run in a web browser. And I mean this as a distinct activity from "browsing the web" (which might be something like HN or researching a topic or shopping).
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%?
That reminds me of the feature that windows 11 finally broke that I’ve loved since windows 98: quick launch toolbars.
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.
Also compact size for bar and more customizable start menu. I don't need to waste a space by recommended files and also compact shortcuts would make my start menu more efficient.
Vertical has always been much wider than the horizontal layout is tall, at least when using the small taskbar icons setting. However the third-party utility 7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows narrower vertical taskbars, which actually makes the vertical orientation ideal if placed on the left-hand side (the least interacted with edge of a desktop, ie: less likely to be accidentally interacted with).
> You can make it narrow enough to only just fit the date at the bottom, without third-party utilities, which seems small enough.
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.
I think 16:10 strikes a nice balance, particularly on laptop displays. It's wide enough to handle a couple of side-by-side windows well without feeling particularly starved for vertical pixels.
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.
UI designer really needs to avoid pushing tall horizontal bars. Often a website takes up more 1/3 of the vertical screen space with FIXED bars. No I don’t care to stare at your search bar. Not everyone works on a big desktop monitor.
Taskbar program icon overlay icons (such as red/green/yellow status indicators for Skype and other IM programs, or the New Mail symbol for Outlook) are only visible in Large Taskbar mode - in Small Icons mode the overlays are entirely hidden. Those overlays do convey useful information, it's a shame MS couldn't find a way to make them work in Small Icons mode.
---
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)
It'd be nice if it'd use the best resolution available but the Chrome icon needed to be fixed regardless. Windows doesn't guarantee a quantized DPI so the icon is always going to need to scale.
Indeed. I have been using Explorer Patcher only for the single reason that I don't need or want a big tall taskbar. I was fine with my "small icon" taskbar from Windows 10.
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!"
Microsoft is not what it used to be.. now unbloat all the stuff and remove useless services.. they are about to miss on the Handheld console revolution.. crazy when you think about it, they own windows yet they let it rot, just open source it at this point
They could have owned the handheld console market if they had just repeated what Sega and Sony did.
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.
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..
OTOH it's great being a Developer (3x). It's weird being a heavy MS user (VSCode, WSL, Copilot, DX, playwright, etc.) and not even thinking about Windows OS or Office.
"Azure OS" is what matters now, so outside server workloads for Azure, WinDev seems to be left with newly graduated interns without any background on the "Developers, Developers, Developers" days.
If you miss those days, XBox and Azure business lines are the ones that matter nowadays.
I hope they are also going to add support for left/top alignment of the icons (the classic way), for removal of left&right margins in centered alignment (Mac way) so places to the left and right of the icons would be free screen space rather than empty panel area, good support for horizontal panel placing, turn system icons (unmount device, network indicators, sound volume&output control, keyboard layout indicator, clock and calemdar etc) into first-class panel icons rather than tray icons (they just look ugly in case of horizontal panel placement).
Fix: I meant good support for vertical panel placing. Horizontal obviously has always been reasonably good. Vertical has always been more or less ugly and I am not sure if it is supported in Windows 11 at all.
I used Windows server 2022 for first time today on a vps. It's what I imagine we all want windows to be. Just simple Windows 10ish ui without all the fluff. I imagine its very stable too given its for servers. Reminds me of Windows 2000 I ran on my Pentium 2. Does anyone just use Windows sever 2022 on their desktop? Why not?
The equivalent OS for desktops is the Windows 11 Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release, which is what you described but with desktop pricing and a few minor differences.
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.
Wait, they released the windows 11 LTSC?! or was that a typo? Because I actually really like windows 11 as an OS, I just hate the stuff that comes with the pro version (ads, weird update patterns, driver updates that override your manually installed drivers...). Windows 11 LTSC would be awesome, but from what I read on the Windows blogs, Microsoft doesn't seem to like the whole concept of an LTSC release anymore.
Microsoft likes to delay LTSC availability longer and longer in a futile attempt to wean customers off it. They just don't understand why not everybody likes to take the abuse they dish out.
Windows 7 was the last Windows UI I didn't hate. With the exception of Task Manager, which was seriously spiffed up, there's very little about Windows 10 that I prefer over Windows 7, and a whole lot that's objectively worse.
> Windows 10 UI is far more confusing than Windows 7
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.
There is an important change here compared to "classical" Windows, labeled taskbar item widths are now flexible. I really welcome this, others might not.
Unless a UI is completely broken, or you want the user to do something completely different, there is no reason to make large changes. You can continue making incremental improvements for years, just look at macos.
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.
The existing windows 11 taskbar just has the application icon with the windows grouped - so if you have 3 firefox windows open, you get one icon for firefox and never any text associated. If there's an open application its differentiated from a shortcut with a dot underneath.
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.
Thank you! I am very fond of the non-grouped taskbar with title text and small icons, which is the classic functional design in Windows 95/98/2000/Me. I turned off grouping ever since XP. Starting in 7, I turned off the default big icons and re-enabled text. This served me well in 8 and 10. But seeing how Windows 11 had the useless, offensive taskbar, I vowed to never upgrade to it and declare 10 as the end of the line. But now there is hope again.
These small animations in the task bar look very Linux-ish to me, and not in a good way. They're too playful IMO, and will probably start feeling annoying quite quickly.
Hopefully they'll also bring back the ability to middle click on tray icons that they apparently silently broke/removed recently when they released the so called Windows 11 Moment 2 update with these new taskbar and tray area "improvements", even though they do not acknowledge it when reporting it on the feedback hub, their github issue trackers, their twitter, etc.
I figured this would happen, and I figured I'd have a few years to hold off updating before they forced me to. Glad it looks like things are going to be mostly back to par by then
So my desktop PC does not support Windows 11 (according to Windows Update). I guess I shouldn't be too sad about that fact, but I am concerned about future compatibility.
I wouldn’t worry about future compatibility anytime soon but Win11 is starting to get some noticeable feature improvements that won’t ever come to Win10 - e.g. phone link for iPhones, sandbox reboots.
I know you’re trolling, but it’s funny that the CLI is the most productive UI and it is literally ancient/obsolete in computer time yet it persists. New != better.
I'm actually not trolling. I find Apple's UI legitimately unproductive, a mix of 80s, 90s and 2000s thinking that didn't survive the test of time. Window's older taskbar is vastly superior, as the CLI, both examples of UIs that got it right.
What do you mean cave... taskbar with those features is essential... If the OS doesn't have that, it sucks and I need 3rd party alternatives to make it usable.
