Coming here to say this too. Having each window correspond to a button on the task bar is crucial for my workflow as I use individual windows as one layer of grouping for the eventual tabs in those windows.

(Not supporting ungrouped one-click dock access to individual windows is one of the reasons I dislike using Mac OS...)

I was massively disappointed that Win 11 removed this as it made it so annoying to only have individual window access after hove. Actually turned off the TPM on my PC to prevent Windows update from pulling another one of those "forced upgrades" like they did for win10. Perhaps when this is out I will finally be OK with "upgrading" (hopefully the first-party ads also continue to be disable-able, that is)

I quite literally paid for a third-party app (StartAllBack) to do this for me (amongst other things).

I'm glad I found about this small App a while back. Super useful and incredibly cheap for the amount of small issues it solves.

I've been using ExplorerPatcher.

Great app, highly recommended and with 100 days trial on top of being super cheap

Even if they let me sidemount the taskbar in w11 I will stick with SAB for the hack that lets me make it extra thin.

I hope "Use small taskbar buttons" is back too. The default taskbar takes too much vertical space.

That reminds me of the feature that windows 11 finally broke that I’ve loved since windows 98: quick launch toolbars.

You could put shortcuts in a folder somewhere, and them to the task bar as a quick launch toolbar. This would show each shortcut as a single-click launcher showing a small mini icon. You could then give the toolbar a name, and shrink it so every icon is hidden, which effectively turned it into a named menu.

I’d put all my game shortcuts in a folder, add it as a quick launch toolbar called “Games”, and it would basically give me a global menu to run a game whenever I wanted with 2 clicks.

I used this feature all the way from Windows 98 to Windows 10, until they finally broke it for no good reason in Windows 11.

A huge portion of "applications" I use on my computer happen to run in a web browser. And I mean this as a distinct activity from "browsing the web" (which might be something like HN or researching a topic or shopping).

All the browsers have the ability to open both windows and tabs. If I wanted stuff grouped in one taskbar item, I'd open a tab. If I've specifically opened a new window, I am specifically saying I don't want those grouped -- the OS applying its own grouping is obnoxious.

If all the apps I use had native executables, they'd appear as their own taskbar icon. If they were wrapped in an Electron app, I'd have essentially the same user experience but they'd get their own icon.

My point is really that combining windows/processes that happen to be hosted by the same executable is silly -- even as a highly technical user I don't care about that detail. I'm doing a semantically different activity; I specifically opened a new window; I want a dedicated taskbar icon for it.

I'd be curious: if "Always combine" wasn't actually the default, how many users would specifically turn it on? 50%? 5%? A fraction of 1%?

> curious: if "Always combine" wasn't actually the default, how many users would specifically turn it on? 50%? 5%? A fraction of 1%?

With a vertical Taskbar this is the only option, in my case.

Also compact size for bar and more customizable start menu. I don't need to waste a space by recommended files and also compact shortcuts would make my start menu more efficient.

Start menu in Win11 is dumbier.