Tali Roth, the then product manager working on the core Windows user experience, including the Start menu, taskbar, and notifications, took up the question and talked about how building the taskbar from scratch meant that they had to cherry-pick things to put into the feature list first, and the ability to move the taskbar didn’t make the cut, for several reasons that Microsoft values.
WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!
If you have working code, why would you rewrite it from scratch? Refactor, sure. Overhaul, maybe. But why rewrite the whole thing?! You’re gaining nothing but unnecessary bugs.
I know all the joke answers. To justify a product manager’s salary, because Microsoft gonna Microsoft, whatever. I want to know the real reason. Why would you ever rewrite working code from scratch if you don’t have to?
Probably to add something terrible for the user but good for MS. Ad integration? Easier to spy?
Microsoft’s data shows such users are really small when compared to the number of users who are asking for other newer features in the taskbar.
Asking for things like AI integration everywhere?
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could have AI on the desktop clock so you could ask it what time it was in different places in the world?
I was going to make a joke that they could also replace the taskbar search bar with an AI chat bar, but after reading the article, it turns out that they’re planning on doing that for real:
Windows 11 taskbar is now being “upgraded” with AI-first features. Microsoft is working on the Ask Copilot bar, which may replace Windows Search in the taskbar.
Your best sarcastic self is prime Microsoft material.
Let’s be real, it’s because it makes it easier to train AIs on the Recall screenshots if it always has the taskbar in the same position as a reference context
Four years ago, Recall wasn’t a thing. Microsoft was caught as off-guard by the AI hype machine as the rest of us. So I doubt this was originally the reason.
Might be now, though.
No exaggeration, this was my breaking point for switching to linux exclusively.
Same.
My wife was given a new work computer. Windows 11 and not enough RAM. She has been finding a new reason to hate it nearly every day, starting with how every change made to windows has fucked up her workflow in some way.
Me just nodding in acknowledgement as my little Dell Inspiron 15 purs along on Mint with Cinnamon.
https://www.stardock.com/products/start11/
Costs money but works with only minor quirks when switching between iGPU and dGPU.
Laughs in KDE
“We specifically made the product worse, because that saves us money we don’t need and gives us additional control over users’ computers, since so many are locked into our ecosystem.”
Seriously, read the article. That’s basically it!
The bit about apps having to reflow seems nonsensical. They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.
I’m not accepting any excuses from MS about limited resources when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists have the feature in question.
They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.
The whole operating system is even named after that concept.
Yeah, sounds like bullshit. I don’t even see why that particular concern would create more work on the OS’s part.
If an application fits “wonderfully” into the space it’s given, Windows did nothing but telling it the dimensions it needs to fill. And as you said those dimensions can vary wildly.
Yeah especially considering you can install 3rd party solutions to dock the taskbar to the left which work perfectly fine
In Windows 10, you could move it to the top, left, or right of the screen.
In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10. Let’s not sell short the full extent idiocy on display, here.
“Pouring its engineering resources,” my ass.
In the launch version of windows 11 and for over TWO YEARS it didn’t even support drag&drop. It was working fine even on windows me
Drag and drop worked on windows 3.1. That was like the whole thing. “LOOK WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW!”
At this point, I’m fairly sure pissing people off is the point with Windows 11. It’s full of AI no one wants, refuses to officially run on most hardware that people already have, despite running just fine on that same hardware UNofficially, dropped support for drag and drop, doesn’t let you move the taskbar.
And thats not even to mention the fact that it monitors you, and reports back to HQ with screen grabs and usage activity.
Oh look, ZorinOS, just one singular distro, had 1.6 million downloads in the past 2 months.
Wait, is there any special thing that happened 2 months ago? Oh right. Windows 10 support ended, and microsoft told its userbase “fuck you, you can’t get support for windows 10, and this computer can’t update to windows 11. This computer is now trash!”
Suddenly all these youtube videos pop up “Is your PC unable to install windows 11? Try linux!”
And these videos don’t try to sway you to one distro or another. They point out a few big hitters like mint or ubuntu. I can’t imagine them specifically naming zorin, unless it’s a zorin centric video. But I’m talking about the flood of “try linux” videos that popped up in October.
And that 1.6 million is JUST zorin. That’s the runoff. I don’t have numbers, or sources, but gut instinct tells me that if Zorin had 1.6 million downloads, Mint must have had like 5 million minimum. Every video always reccomends Mint. It’s probably overtaken Ubuntu at some point as most used distro.
And all of this, every single bit of user loss has NOTHING to do with linux. Users are angrily switching. Not happily. They feel abandoned, and forced to switch.
If Microsoft either extended Windows 10 support, or allowed Windows 11 to be installed on reasonable hardware, this linux boom DOES NOT HAPPEN. This is Microsoft saying “Yeah bitch, money is tight! Go buy another computer, loser! You’ll do what we say, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us!”
That’s when users switched to linux. This is pure hubris from Microsoft. It would be interesting if somehow we could get a combined number of EVERY distros doenload numbers.
Drag and drop is the entire bases for windows. How do you release a version without it?
And it kind of makes sense to have the taskbar at the right or left on a widescreen monitor as there is so much space there
The years of engineering salaries and test versions to dock a visual element at the top, instead of the bottom…
I’d guess it’s for the same reasons why we can’t have a local account
it’s safe to assume that the company isn’t interested in pouring its engineering resources into pursuing something that won’t benefit a majority of users
I mean, they could just let their awesome Copilot vibe code it, couldn’t they? Another reasons why I love being on Linux; you can do whatever even it it doesn’t make sense to the majority of users.
Like half of open source is just devs trying to satisfy their very specific needs
Even if it will brick your system.
I mean, they could just let their awesome Copilot vibe code it, couldn’t they?
This is one of the best proofs that the AI industry is full of bullshit. If we can let the AI code everything now, where are our leaps in traditional, existing software?
AI is very good at writing code but it’s not good code.
Because fuck you, that’s why.
- Microsoft
Saved you a click.
Seriously, only go there for the facepalms.
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 have a wonderful experience in those environments is just huge
It was working fine in windows 95. Suddenly all programmers became incompetent and can’t handle something like that?
This makes no sense to me what so ever. Why do any apps care about where the taskbar is? How’s it any different when a window isn’t maximised and the user resizes it? Either I’m seriously misunderstanding this or it’s a completely made up excuse.
I’d rather they just say “we completely rewrote the taskbar, but we know that less than 0.01% of users move their taskbar so we didn’t prioritize it”.
To me the bigger issue with the taskbar is that you can’t make it compact. Instead it has to be a big chunky mess.
All programmers by microsoft. They cant code anymore
It is lost technology… only the powerful ancients could accomplish such.
Or those familiar with the dark arts.
Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
WHAT DATA?!
They asked chatgpt
But, only after not getting an answer from Copilot.
Same thing.
Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you’ll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.
There’s a format dialog from NT still present in win 11
edit: it’s from 1994 according to the person who wrote it
The main one I use is the network adaptor settings, where you can enable/disable protocols and most importantly for me, where you can easily add multiple IP addresses on a network adaptor.
The Win 8+ network settings page is an absolute trainwreck. I particularly like how it doesn’t warn about conflicting IP addresses now and just silently accepts your given address and provides an auto-assigned 169.254 address instead if it sees even the smallest hint of another computer out there using the address you want to use.
Guaranteed fun and confusion trying to access/ping things until you finally check the status of the network adaptor and discover the auto assigned address, thanks Microsoft.
Not everyone wants to use dhcp, which is clearly their preferred direction, and there have been bugs where Cisco devices trigger that flip to auto assigned addresses even if things are fine.
Most of the old settings are at least easily reached if you can remember their names such as ncpa.cpl for the settings you mention but when you write “control printers” you get sent into the new Settings view now. Instead you gotta go to the control panel and change view from category to small or large icons to finally right click Devices and Printers and choose “open in a new window” to get there. If you left click it you get sent to the new Settings view.
Two data points: What their intern could do with React; what their intern couldn’t do with React.
The data they have compiled from years of people using Win 10 and Msoft Edge.
If they were using that data, then they would have included features people actually use in 10. Or maybe they’re just doing the inverse of whatever the data suggests.
Data can say whatever the hell you want if you lack scruples.
It’s Microsoft, they have all the data. And quite frankly it doesn’t surprise even a little bit, i doubt even 5% of people moved around the taskbar, people are just ready to hitch themselves to every bandwagon they see shitting on Microsoft.
In that case, based on the roughly 1.5 billion Windows users, that’ll only affect a mere 75 million users for a feature that’s been there since Windows 95.
The equation they are thinking of, though, is “will the cost of those who actually quit using Windows outweigh the cost of building and maintaining this feature.” Funnily enough the inability to move the taskbar is what finally pushed me to Linux full-time, but the overwhelming majority will complain and stick to Windows.
