Vertical has always been much wider than the horizontal layout is tall, at least when using the small taskbar icons setting. However the third-party utility 7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows narrower vertical taskbars, which actually makes the vertical orientation ideal if placed on the left-hand side (the least interacted with edge of a desktop, ie: less likely to be accidentally interacted with).

My monitor is 32:9, I don't care how wide the vertical taskbar is.

You can make it narrow enough to only just fit the date at the bottom, without third-party utilities, which seems small enough.

Also, there's typically plenty of spare width and not much spare height, due to modern aspect ratios, so it's a win, anyway.

Also also, if you do the maths, the typical vertical taskbar can be significantly thicker and use no more screen area.

> You can make it narrow enough to only just fit the date at the bottom, without third-party utilities, which seems small enough.

Not sure about your system but on both of mine by default it's over double the thickness of the horizontal taskbar when small icons are used.

> Also also, if you do the maths, the typical vertical taskbar can be significantly thicker and use no more screen area.

So I measured this on my system with a 2560x1440px monitor (16:9 being a typical aspect ratio). Horizontal taskbar total pixels: 76800. Vertical taskbar total pixels: 96480. Vertical orientation still objectively consumes more screen real estate, unless the 7+ Taskbar Tweaker mod is used.

A sibling comment mentions a user with an ultrawide though, which due to the sheer width I suppose is a scenario where the default vertical is smaller overall. Or perhaps if larger icons are used.

I miss the 16/10 era of monitors so much. I saw it advertised as a feature in some recent laptop.

My laptop is a 16:10 screen! I love it.

Lots of notebooks thankfully adopted 16:10 or even 3:2 again, yeah.

I miss 3:4. Don't know why everyone loves these stupidly wide monitors. Modern displays have fewer vertical pixels than my damn 2002-era CRT did.

I think you mean 4:3

Maybe they compute in tate mode.

I think 16:10 strikes a nice balance, particularly on laptop displays. It's wide enough to handle a couple of side-by-side windows well without feeling particularly starved for vertical pixels.

For large monitors though (27"+) the need for width is reduced… I've never used a 4:3 or 5:4 monitor that large but I don't think it'd bother me nearly as much as those aspect ratios at small sizes do.

If you are willing to use a commercial (though cheap with $5) app, I use StartAllBack [0] for this.

[0]: https://www.startallback.com/

Auto-hide with no animation is the only way to not waste screen space, the rest just move the waste around.

UI designer really needs to avoid pushing tall horizontal bars. Often a website takes up more 1/3 of the vertical screen space with FIXED bars. No I don’t care to stare at your search bar. Not everyone works on a big desktop monitor.