While I have many grievances with Windows 11, I am particularly upset about the taskbar. Back in Windows 10, I used a double-height taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen. I forget the name of the specific setting, but all windows would appear as their own item, and, the taskbar would ensure that all items retained the same width.

The taskbar in Windows 11 is a downgrade in every conceivable way. I can look past having the icons be centered and grouped by default, as that is an option that can be configured. I can't get past not being able to at least make a double height taskbar. But the biggest frustration is that Windows 11 refuses to make ungrouped items have a static width. Moreover, the width of a taskbar item will depend on the title of the window. So when I have a browser open with multiple windows the taskbar will animate the taskbar item expanding or contracting based on the title of the page I am looking at. I, personally, find this incredibly distracting, especially considering how often one visits a different page or tab while browsing. While Windows 10 also changed the size of taskbar items, it only did that when opening a new window and the taskbar was full. Even so, it would resize all existing items to the same dimension.

This became nigh intolerable for me, but thankfully, I was given permission to install a third-party taskbar and start menu replacement called Start11. I would say it gives me about 95% of the functionality I wanted back. At home, I'm still running Windows 10.

▲

Tempest1981 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, it seems like UI designers only solve the basic use case: beginner user with 3 apps open on a 14" laptop, each full screen, or tiled side-by-side.

I imagine them presenting their design on a static PowerPoint slide, and upper-management says "beautiful", and they move on to CoPilot features, never looking back.

▲

jabroni_salad 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The Teams... team... took several years to let us pop out chats to their own windows. The minimum size of the window was almost half my screen for a long time, which was annoying since it had a mobile app and my phone is way smaller.

Someone would send you a document and it took over the entire Teams window. You had to exit it in order to chat with the person about the document. The concept of having more than one 'thing' on screen at the time was completely missing. My only explanation was that the developers had never used a computer before.

	▲	robocat 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> the developers Try not to blame the people working at the coal face. Developers lack influence in most companies, they are told what to do by product managers and the rot often gets worse further up the hierarchy chain. Developers mostly know what is wrong and don't like the shit they are doing. Imagine the anger of working on Server 2012 (Windows Server 8) with the default Metro UI - that idiocy had to go right to the top. How independent are developers at Microsoft - are they in charge of product design decisions?

▲

mrmuagi 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I am particularly needy when it comes to the taskbar. I installed a few mods:

* Windhawk - can tweak taskbar with extensions similiar to gnome tweaks imo (free)

* DisplayFusion - qol for multi monitor setups (paid)

I would give it a try if these two applications help you, honestly there's just so many settings to explore -- but afaik static width was something I needed and got done through Windhawk.

	▲	buccal 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You should not have to hack Explorer to make it usable.