Is it intuitive? I honestly didn't know this was something you could do, and it doesn't seem to work for me. The most I am able to do while dragging something to the taskbar is to pin it to the application that could open it. Other times I just get the same red 'X' as on Windows 11.

Is there a use pattern that I'm just not thinking of?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27924367

Your mouse, you mean? Otherwise you have some explaining to do :)

Next look at the top of the screen and then without moving your head, look at the taskbar. You can do it, but try it several times and it will probably start to feel a little weird. Your head is likely to want to move a bit, and holding it still takes effort.

YMMV.

On my personal machine I rarely have duplicate windows, so I can rely on the icons.

That's very strange. I have been a Windows developer since the 90s so I've seen a lot of setups, between other developers and all the users I have had to interact with. So this number is in the thousands easily.

I've never seen a Windows taskbar not on the bottom outside of people just experimenting with layouts, similar to how people experiment with things like WindowBlinds or Classic Shell. I don't recall ever seeing this on a business user or even a developer machine.

I'm not even being hyperbolic here. I don't recall one single instance of remoting into a machine for support, or being sent a screenshot by an end-user, that has the taskbar anywhere but the bottom.

That's since Windows 3.1.

Was this really a feature people were complaining about? Really?????

Why remove this feature?

What logic is this?

Trying to imitate apple os?

If I count it since 1992, and divide by the number of Windows devs I have met in life, it is pratically zero anyway.

Even just different monitors. While supposedly both are 16:9, my main monitor and my laptop have very different proportions. The laptop feels cramped vertically, so I move the taskbar to the left edge to have more space. Guess I'll autohide it when I upgrade.

I experimented with all four sides. When I last used it on the bottom I often had it "huge" (three or four rows) with auto-hide because I didn't want to cramp vertical space that much. I thought left and top got too much in the way of Fitt's Law related muscle memory. (More applications have important controls like menus to the top and left, and when maximized you are used to just rushing the mouse to the screen corner to access them, having to back across the taskbar never quite worked for me.)

Right-hand side seemed optimal to me in Windows XP and continues to feel that way today, especially as monitors have only gotten wider from when I started on classic square CRTs.

Since Vista introduced "Aero Peek" I felt far less of a need for window titles directly in the Taskbar, so I generally only ever use the Taskbar about the same width as the default height when at the bottom. (I like it just a tiny bit wider than that where on the main monitor in a vertical orientation Windows expands out the full date and day of the week in the clock panel.) At those widths my right side taskbars take up far fewer total pixels (and especially far fewer total unused "whitespace" pixels) on widescreen than a horizontal taskbar. It's especially a stark contrast on my ultrawidescreen home desktop where you just lose so much valuable screen real estate to wide empty expanses of taskbar when horizontal.

(I even appreciate the thought/theory behind the centering they are going for bringing things better into "eye line" on an ultrawide, but with all those wasted pixels around it I could be using to uncramp vertical space in apps, I think they have the right general idea but the very wrong implementation.)

But as far as I remember, even since '95 you could move the taskbar to whichever edge you wanted.

Would not be happy if that no longer became possible.