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.

> win11 is a completely new program

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).

At one point that was just quaint, now it's getting ridiculous.

The Win 3.0 folder selection dialog is still around.

> how bad was the win10 task bar codebase

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.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/reb...

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.