Re:How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
by jabbany on Monday January 02, 2023 @10:54AM
(#34219231)
Probably different use cases but I've never found tools that show the window contents to be useful over the window title.
I almost always have many windows that would have thumbnails essentially indistinguishable from each other (think text editors, file managers, terminal prompts etc.)
So I use the task bar as almost like a system wide "tab" interface. Grouping stuff into the app icon is terrible because I can't easily tell if I have a window of the type I want already open. I don't click on the taskbar items to navigate, rather I use them to check what is already open so I can quickly keyboard switch to them.
The Win11 UI completely breaks this workflow so now I either need to do a linear search to flip through all windows, or pull up either the task view or hover menu above the app icon, and pray I can tell apart the huge grid of identical window thumbnails.
Unluckily in Windows the taskbar became more essential than the dock in macOS for switching windows - on Mac I use the dock to start new instances or quitting the app (differing philosophy of window and app lifetime between mac and win), not much of a switching - and then they ruined this essential taskbar thing without good alternative on Windows (Ctrl + Tab is more like a complementary thing than alternative).