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.
"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"
Is this what hearing Vogon Poetry is like?
This almost makes me want to move my panel in Plasma just because I can.
Why can’t they just ask copilot to program that for them?
Microsoft UI “designers” need to be beaten with frozen braids of 3 foot long licorice ropes.
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?
It really seems like Windows really needs KDE to come back to the platform…
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?
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?
They let their AI do it for them
But this was four years ago! Actually it was released four years ago. This decision was almost certainly made before there were widespread code assistance AIs.
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.
This is such a weird take. Recall wasn’t even a glimmer in M$’s eye when this limitation was introduced. And it would take virtually nothing to add positions to the training, never mind the fact that they could just completely ignore the taskbar since the OS always knows where it is.
Further the containers contain the info, so the position on the users’ screen is rather irrelevant.
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.
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!
I think you’re overinterpreting a bit. Actually the MS-droid doesn’t really say anything. Just that the taskbar is not movable. Which was exactly the question.Typical evasion strategy.
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.
It also has a very poorly written UI interface that’s fucking infuriating. I was reverse engineering it to figure out why it’s so damn slow on HDDs, with explorer.exe rendering like shit, the Start menu crawling, and taskbar popups that make you want to smash your screen. They wrote really really fucking bad code compared to the Win7 days—basically just took the old MFC crap and slapped a XAML wrapper on it to make it look “nice.” What a fucking disaster.
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
What does making sense have to do with MS-Windows?
The years of engineering salaries and test versions to dock a visual element at the top, instead of the bottom…
