This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Microsoft wants to use the Taskbar for advertising. They can't do that if users can move it around or hide it.
The whole explanation about screen size is telling.
The entire point of Windows being named Windows is that apps can run inside these resizable rectangles nicknamed windows.
Yet the rectangular taskbar is apparently impossible to handle...
It's never been done before, and can never be done after, obviously. Not a chance. Nope. It's not like it worked before, not like windows placement is not really the business of the taskbar app, not like it works with almost every other DE/OS, too.
Absolutely impossible. Microsoft, that apparently did not make windows up until now otherwise they'd know this explanation is pure bullshit, have absolutely no way, no resources, no knowledge on how to setup the available rectangular area on the screen for window placement. Nope.
Quote from Microsoft..."You will be happy in your work!". /s
the reason is literally "because we decided not to implement it"
Saved you a click.
I'm one of the few who has had it at the top for as long as I can remember. It absolutely infuriated me to find out the feature had been removed.
Im more of a left-side guy, but i share your pain
Meanwhile KDE:
Put the taskbar wherever you want it's even floating if there isn't a window nearby.
Different design pressures. KDE knowing they put in the work to keep it versatile now, they will always have more options in the future.
Microsoft is basically admitting they have no future.
Can you have different taskbar setup depending on the number of monitors and have it change automatically when you connect/disconnect external monitors?
Yes, my work laptop has this with a 1, 2 or 3 monitor setup. It adapts as it detects the screens.
Yes! I'm not sure about it changing when you connect monitors (since I'm usually using desktop PCs), but you can have a different setup per monitor.
I have three monitors at work. My main monitor is configured to show all open apps in the taskbar, while the secondary monitors only show the apps opened on those monitors. You can totally change any of the configuration though... the layout, the position, the settings, or even just not have a taskbar on some monitors.
Apps then need to constantly reflow their layouts, resize content, adjust snapping behavior, and handle edge cases across different screen sizes, DPI settings, and multi-monitor setups. Also, this reflow logic has to work perfectly for legacy Win32 apps, modern UWP apps, and everything in between.
You mean the apps that were already handling this for decades when windows wasn't a vibe-coded and ad-infested vehicle for AI slop?
Yeah this doesn't make sense. Docked bars have worked fine since Windows 95. You could have the task bar on any side, and apps would handle it. You could have multiple docked bars too, as some third-party apps used to be dockable. For example, Winamp had a view that was a short bar stretching the entire width of the screen, stuck to the top of the screen. The windowing system handled it fine.
Imagine letting your computer decide how you're gonna use it 😖
Why would applications have to consider relayouting? Isn't that entirely in the hand of the Windows taskbar?
It shows the window groups, windows, pops over previews of windows or tabs in a consistent style, presumably owned by the taskbar itself. At no point do applications themselves control their positions or size in the taskbar or the taskbar popovers.
Windows 11 is a bloated disaster. I urge everyone to switch to Linux or one of the BSDs.
Also switch away from Microsoft Office and use LibreOffice.
Using BSDs is for Unix fetishists, honestly. I've been such. It's very pleasant to use FreeBSD on supported configuration, or OpenBSD on supported configuration and when you don't need anything impossible (like Wine).
But when you are a normal person who just wants to do normal things and live, Linux is more likely to be the thing, and Fedora will do.
In practice. In theory you might think you'd like GuixSD or NixOS, but in practice you won't spend the time on setting them up. Or Slackware, but it's even more bother. Or Arch, but it's too messy, stuff breaks and it's normal. You either want experience similar to BSDs or lack of bother similar to BSDs. For the former, there are plenty of distributions with ideology to spend days on setting up. For the latter, just install Fedora.
I'm using Void because that's what I installed the last time and forgot. But if I were choosing now, I'd probably, yes, just install Fedora.
And it's a shame they are slowly killing Windows. It could have been a nice desktop OS. There's some cultural similarity to Amiga that isn't felt under Unix-likes. And NT is interesting to read about.
I hope we'll have more pluralism in future. On the humus of today's tech.
New taskbar from ground up. And despite all the requests to bring the feature back, their reasoning amounts to "we're too lazy"
My screen is wider than it is tall. I have more horizontal screen real estate than vertical, why are you forcing me to waste vertical space? I wanna move it to the left again...
building the taskbar from scratch meant that they had to cherry-pick things to put into the feature list first, and the ability to move the taskbar didn’t make the cut, for several reasons that Microsoft values.
Translation: Nobody really knows (or wants to take the blame), we probably just forgot to put on the feature list. Anyway, I'll just use the usual vague weasel-words that don't really mean anything.
This is written as if a taskbar were a complex piece of software. It has to display a window list, a start button, a few shortcuts and a tray, right?
Nothing is trivial, but they are a company that can buy some nation-states with their citizens as slaves. Surely they can buy that much labor.
"Window's is built on many layers of shit and we dont know what will or won't break things.
Also co pilot was really expensive"
Windhawk and ExplorerPatcher will allow this while windows still resize correctly, so it's a mystery to me as to why MSFT won't do it.
For anyone interested, Google the app called WindHawk. It makes it extremely possible to push the taskbar up.
The taskbar items can't have a constant width. Your whole taskbar layout changes when you change a tab in Firefox. You have to open a set of programs from right to left, because any other order will change the positions of the items you want to click.
When not combining windows, in Windows 10 you could order them to your preference and usefulness. Now, you're stuck. Even when not combined, the items are combined in one block, and you can't order them within the block either.
This almost makes me want to move my panel in Plasma just because I can.
I was briefly a star at work when all of the terminals updated to Win 11. I was the only dude that knew how to move the start button back to the lower left corner.
Is this what hearing Vogon Poetry is like?
If it takes so much effort to move the taskbar, why did it need to be fully rewritten in react native when everything worked before?
Tali Roth, the then product manager working on the core Windows user experience, including the Start menu, taskbar, and notifications, took up the question and talked about how building the taskbar from scratch meant that they had to cherry-pick things to put into the feature list first, and the ability to move the taskbar didn’t make the cut, for several reasons that Microsoft values.
WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!
If you have working code, why would you rewrite it from scratch? Refactor, sure. Overhaul, maybe. But why rewrite the whole thing?! You're gaining nothing but unnecessary bugs.
I know all the joke answers. To justify a product manager's salary, because Microsoft gonna Microsoft, whatever. I want to know the real reason. Why would you ever rewrite working code from scratch if you don't have to?
Microsoft’s data shows such users are really small when compared to the number of users who are asking for other newer features in the taskbar.
Asking for things like AI integration everywhere?
