In a recent Ask Me Anything (AMA), Microsoft revealed that it does not plan to make the Taskbar movable because of engineering difficulties and lack of public demand. However, that makes no sense.
Yesterday, we reported that Microsoft has no plans to allow users to change the Taskbar location in Windows 11, because it thinks that not enough people want it, hence it’s not high on its priority list. It also cited engineering difficulties in the process and basically said that it has no plans to make the Taskbar movable again in Windows 11. Well, none of that reasoning makes any sense, so let’s break down Microsoft’s argument and discuss it in more detail. Microsoft’s Head of Product Tali Roth started off by saying that: Having the Taskbar on the right or left apparently breaks the flow of apps… even though it worked fine in Windows 10? That’s kind of the crux of the problem here, when Microsoft rebuilt the Taskbar from scratch, it essentially removed a lot of the functionality that people used in Windows 10. This was done in the name of simplification and I have complained about this before too. Coming over to another problem, the rebuilt Taskbar is reportedly a relic from the now-defunct Windows 10X, an OS that was being designed for dual-screen devices where design simplification was needed. Simply porting it over to Windows 11 meant that people on regular devices lost a lot of functionality in the process.
