This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
the reason is literally "because we decided not to implement it"
Saved you a click.
I'm one of the few who has had it at the top for as long as I can remember. It absolutely infuriated me to find out the feature had been removed.
Apps then need to constantly reflow their layouts, resize content, adjust snapping behavior, and handle edge cases across different screen sizes, DPI settings, and multi-monitor setups. Also, this reflow logic has to work perfectly for legacy Win32 apps, modern UWP apps, and everything in between.
You mean the apps that were already handling this for decades when windows wasn't a vibe-coded and ad-infested vehicle for AI slop?
New taskbar from ground up. And despite all the requests to bring the feature back, their reasoning amounts to "we're too lazy"
Hey copilot, code me a new start menu that restores classic functionality.
Copilot: “I can’t do that, Dave.”
Windows 11 is a bloated disaster. I urge everyone to switch to Linux or one of the BSDs.
Also switch away from Microsoft Office and use LibreOffice.
Using BSDs is for Unix fetishists, honestly. I've been such. It's very pleasant to use FreeBSD on supported configuration, or OpenBSD on supported configuration and when you don't need anything impossible (like Wine).
But when you are a normal person who just wants to do normal things and live, Linux is more likely to be the thing, and Fedora will do.
In practice. In theory you might think you'd like GuixSD or NixOS, but in practice you won't spend the time on setting them up. Or Slackware, but it's even more bother. Or Arch, but it's too messy, stuff breaks and it's normal. You either want experience similar to BSDs or lack of bother similar to BSDs. For the former, there are plenty of distributions with ideology to spend days on setting up. For the latter, just install Fedora.
I'm using Void because that's what I installed the last time and forgot. But if I were choosing now, I'd probably, yes, just install Fedora.
And it's a shame they are slowly killing Windows. It could have been a nice desktop OS. There's some cultural similarity to Amiga that isn't felt under Unix-likes. And NT is interesting to read about.
I hope we'll have more pluralism in future. On the humus of today's tech.
For anyone interested, Google the app called WindHawk. It makes it extremely possible to push the taskbar up.
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.
Translation: Nobody really knows (or wants to take the blame), we probably just forgot to put on the feature list. Anyway, I'll just use the usual vague weasel-words that don't really mean anything.
This is written as if a taskbar were a complex piece of software. It has to display a window list, a start button, a few shortcuts and a tray, right?
Nothing is trivial, but they are a company that can buy some nation-states with their citizens as slaves. Surely they can buy that much labor.
"Window's is built on many layers of shit and we dont know what will or won't break things.
Also co pilot was really expensive"
Also, please use copilot... please
Just one more ai tool bro just one more.
Please bro its so good you gotta use them all to make it worth it.
This almost makes me want to move my panel in Plasma just because I can.
My Plasma Panel is on the top and I wouldn't want it anywhere else.
Is this what hearing Vogon Poetry is like?
If it takes so much effort to move the taskbar, why did it need to be fully rewritten in react native when everything worked before?
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?
Someone on Microsoft probably needed an excuse for their pay increase.
"I rebuilt/had the idea to rebuilt the taskbar" sounds a lot better to managers than "I maintained the taskbar".
I assume the code was just too old and convoluted to maintain properly. I'm a bad coder so I've definitely redone parts of my scripts from scratch rather than trying to refactor them.
Then again I'm not a small billion dollar indie company who's main focuses are spying on users and helping to commit genocide.
Probably to add something terrible for the user but good for MS. Ad integration? Easier to spy?
That's fair, but even with that, it's got to be easier to shove it into existing code. Especially if you're trying to do it in a way that people don't notice!
And actually, the Windows 10 start menu infamously had ads, too. So it can't be that.
Could be that refactoring the code for Windows 11 compatibility, and new features, would have been roughly equivalent in effort to rebuilding. If the code has been poked and probed for years already, still follows old patterns, and have devolved into a tightly coupled mess of scattered system dependancies… maybe it just becomes easier to justify rebuilding it as a way of clearing out technical debt?
Microsoft UI "designers" need to be beaten with frozen braids of 3 foot long licorice ropes.
It really seems like Windows really needs KDE to come back to the platform...
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?
Or you could have a widget just showing it for a few timezones. FvwmButtons, Exec exec date ... and Schedule Periodic ... in FVWM can do that.
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.
This is madness. Madness? This is Wiiiiindoooows.
Why the hell ...
They could just make another application. With compact mode to have as a prompt in the corner of the screen, similar to DigiCam or Winamp or other such.
They could even eventually deprecate tools allowing to do the same things it provides.
I can even say that conversational user interfaces are not all idiocy - at some point I dreamed of them replacing all the bright buttons and icons we have.
People making this are not idiots.
But putting a conversational user interface everywhere people expect to have one prompt and a response, preferably with clear logic of that response, - it's just socially hostile behavior.
There really is progress behind this! Or, more precisely, there is sanity, it's not all hype. Making a useful GUI requires learning something about ergonomics and human psychology and tests, most UI designers don't have a clue. And a conversational interface, like in old text quests or MUDs and with these AI chatbots, solves the problem. It doesn't require memorizing a thousand commands and interpreter syntax like a command shell.
Unless you make a UI with downsides of both and upsides of neither. Takes Microsoft to do this.
Your best sarcastic self is prime Microsoft material.
Honestly, at this point Microsoft should do what Apple did, and build a completely new OS on top of the BSD kernel.
Or just Linux. Why even bother with BSD?
Because they would (for some reason) never open their source code.
They only need to open source the kernel. They can build whatever proprietary stuff they want on top of the Linux kernel.
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.
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 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.
Sadly not true. Microsoft removed the Start button in a version of Windows before. It was in Windows 8 (and Windows Server 2012 for some godforsaken reason) with the cursed "metro" interface. MS did it for the same stupid reason they're citing here "tablet and touchscreen users". The uproar caused MS to release Windows 8.1 a year later where they returned the Start button.
No exaggeration, this was my breaking point for switching to linux exclusively.
It's not even unreasonable. If this is the kind of incompetence guides something as simple as the task bar, I don't want to think about how fucked the rest of the code is.
