"When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment is just huge."

Unless I am understanding something really, really wrong... all those apps are windowed, and can and do resize all the time, taskbar or not

Yeah it makes no sense. The resize logic already exists in the OS for other purposes (e.g. when changing screen resolutions), plus it was not a problem in Windows 10.

Now I wonder how big of a mess the Windows shell codebase is...

The problem isn't the Windows Shell, rather the pivot to bring UWP into Win32 instead of the original Project Reunion goal.

Check the GitHub repos for WinUI 3.0, WindowsAppSdk, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT, specially the issues and commit rates per week.

It is as if everyone left to Azure, but there are a few left still trying to make the UWP reboot happen.

Most of the community that really bought into it, moved back into plain Win33/.NET, fed up with the WinRT reboots since Windows 8.

Regardless of the possible mess in the Windows Shell, there is a bigger one in management.

>When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment is just huge.

I have literally been running Windows 11 with the taskbars on the side for 6 months

It's because they're STILL trying to make Windows a mobile OS. And they can't figure it out.

It's the only explanation. The taskbar has been movable since Windows fucking 95. And I've never seen any apps on Windows have any issues with moving it around.

What about making it autohide--doesn't it have a similar implication? Or changing the font height/taskbar height.

Exactly. Or changing your screen resolution...

except they removed the tablety features too, so that can't be the reason imo

…how?

Did you bother to read the post? This does not work in Windows 11.

Furthermore, I suspect grandparent is either similarly confused or using registry hacks.

Indeed,

"It's the only explanation. The taskbar has been movable since Windows fucking 95. And I've never seen any apps on Windows have any issues with moving it around."

Until they decided to take it away in Windows 11.

I think it's worth watching the original clip (2 minutes) as it's more clear there. I got the sense that the company has decided work on other priorities at the moment and that the ability to move the taskbar is somewhere in the backlog.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/tyflzp/microsoft...

> "She continued, citing the fact that the feature is not in high demand."

..but provided no figures (relative to other feature requests, for example) with which to back up this statement.

Because most people that moved the taskbar also disabled the telemetry/spying feature...

Not all users are equally valuable, and I'm guessing that people who disable telemetry are mostly Linux users who just keep a Windows partition around for a few games.

There is a large contingent of heavy Windows users who move their sidebars to the left or right who MS may also be content ignoring, because many of these users have no alternative.

They may, for example, be heavy Excel users, with macros, etc. In why case now other OS is even an option.

Yeah & other high profile tastemakers/taste-havers.

Yeah I think people who use Linux are the opposite of tastemakers, whatever that is. (Taste-undertakers?)

Low snipe. Annnddd... disagree.

In general I think Microsoft Windows has precious few tastemakers. It's a radically consumerist / default system. There are basically no bonding grounds, no places where tasteful Windows users emerge from, gather at. And how could these things emerge from a radically consumerist / default system? Consumer OSes are define by their overwhelming colossal hordes of default users with ultra low interest just scratching by. There is no imaginable place for an interested engaged Windows community to take hold.

Basically it takes way outsider communities to drive this indifferent passive receptive commumity of Windows users to good. The Linux users have tadte, care, empathy... entirely unlike 98% of users who simply passively consume what they are given.

i fall hard away from you. disagree very heavily. it's a tasteless undiscerning world versus people who have some real consideration, who engage. we haven't really figured out how to let the rest of the world engage in a choiceful system, there's still rampant casual violence & disdain for alternatives that in truth work fine.

regardless, there's precious few tastemakers & people with legitimatizable opinions. i can think of few better users than the linux users use lambast, shirk, disdain as the people who have tastes, who care. i dont know why you would so callously & casually disdain caring & community like this. way out of touch to me: what better more responsible authority might we turn to?

It's not a snipe. To be a "tastemaker" your taste eventually has to become mainstream. You say it yourself, Windows is a consumerist/default system. It rarely changes, and when it does, the users hate it. What has Windows taken from Linux? Certainly not the pages upon pages of black+neon tiling window managers of /r/unixporn. That's the part of the community concerned with customization. The rest just use stock KDE or GNOME. How is that different from Windows?

PowerTools is a huge rip off of things Linux users have been doing for decades; tiling &c. Virtual desktops in Windows 10 is another rip off. Mouse Without Borders catching up to long cherished Synergy/Barrier. Good for Microsoft! Catch up! WSL again gave the tastemakers/demanding folk that which they demanded.

I don't think most users could cite what changed between Windows versions. 7->8->10->11.... it's been such a wash. But Linux users see a lot of little things they expected, now semi available.

Microsoft is definitely stealing from the best, and the best ideas are clearly originating on Linux & in open-source.

Virtual desktops have been in Linux/Unix since 1984 or so. Why steal them now? Obviously there's more to the story than "Linux tastemakers made it trendy". Also many of the things you mention (such as cross-device mouse movement) actually started out as commercial products, on Mac, before going to Linux. So to say they were stolen from Linux is just ignoring their history. "Microsoft stole Xyz" is a sure-fire way to get clicks in the Linux/Mac community, but you need to take those stories with a healthy dose of skepticism.

None of these defenses work for me. I 100% see Microsoft chasing the puck of the good, engaged, active user communities- the ones from other platforms. That Linux has been doing it for a long time & Microsoft is only just catching up doesnt change the reality, just shows how bad MS is at adapting to & trying to do more. There's little enough demand to push further, get better there!

I cant find any evidence of a predecessor to Synergy on Mac. Synergy was launched in May 2001, initially for for X11.

Good ideas always happen elsewhere. GUIs getting ripped off of of Xerox is no surprise. Overall there is, I'd claim, extremely little genuine innovation in UIs. GNOME seems to be one of the few out there willing to keep re-beginning, doing radical refreshes, but it's still not like boldly vastly different than other things. But Linux users, with their libre attitudes, are out there exploring & finding what is possible & what makes sense, across dozens of window mamagers & thousands of add-on components & endless exploring/reconfiguring... not just consuming. Of course MS is watching & borrowing the emerging stuff.

Hahaha the assumption here being that only Linux users are power users ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Remember what assumptions get you!

Hard to believe that this is the same Microsoft that put hardcoded hacks into Windows 3.1 so obscure DOS games would work.

The CADT cadre took over some time after Windows 7 and it's just been downhill from there.

Public Service Announcement: If, like me, you were wondering what CADT is, look here https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Dafuq did I just read here?!

Could you please get your shit together and implement basic features we had for decades. The current state is an insult to accessibility.

Yeah its disgusting the lack of understanding of the power features of windows that the new developers obviously lack deep understanding of, how many many workflows they've been breaking with 11.

On the WinUI community calls it is surprising how occasionally one gets starred looks when someone asks about feature X from Win32, Forms, WPF not being available and when.

Random devs are excused to know not all the stuff, but the team pushing what is supposed to be the framework to replace them all?

i have a hunch, if we started putting the taskbar/menu buttons to the side, in mobile devices and apps, we would see late adoption by microsoft.

the menu buttons on the bottom is what mobile has been doing for more than a decade i think

what doesnt quite add up is:

"When it comes to something like actually being able to move the taskbar to different locations on the screen, there's a number of challenges with that," said Roth (via Neowin). "When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment is just huge."

This didnt seem to be too much of an issue, previously, but something fundamental has changed, to make this a challenge

>> i took a look around and found this:

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

not sure if it still work or for how long but it claims to patch in a win10 taskbar

The Windows 11 taskbar was rewritten from scratch, with what it looks like a few bits from the Win32 version bolted on. Hence it never supported putting the taskbar/menu on the side.

Th ExplorerPatcher utility, on the other hand, re-enables the Windows 10 taskbar. It also disables the Snap layouts. I expect that the Windows 10 taskbar will slowly break.

Perhaps alternative taskbars [1] will become popular at some point.

[1]: https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar

Locking the taskbar to the bottom solves one of my most frustrating support cases.

Did they also make it impossible to resize the task bar so it occupies half of the screen?

Yes, yes they did.

I have my Win10 taskbar on the top of the screen and whenever I go full-screen Firefox moves it's window down so low that it cuts off the bottom ~15% of the window and I have to drag the top back up to the taskbar to force a resize in the bounds of the screen. Sometimes it happens to other windows (never Explorer) but Firefox is consistent.

I've been keeping the taskbar at the top, and in Win11 some apps when they open they automatically move behind the taskbar so I cannot drag them away. I have to resize a corner, so it recognises it's behind another object and stutters down.

This is hilarious. Something so simple, that even on Win 98 it was just a given.

I’d probably feel some form of shame if I was a highly compensated engineer at M$ and our manager was giving the “its too hard” excuse.