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Comment by rgovostes | Hacker News Reader

To demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment to Windows quality, you can now move the taskbar to the left side of the screen. No no, it's not vaporware, they even included four screenshots. Everyone can rest assured now.

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A feature they removed due to their inability to make it performant in Windows 11 A feature that existed as early as win95. The most requested change in user voice, since the earliest windows 11 betas.

It takes a team of Ph.D. level engineers to implement left-hand taskbars in a performant way! You can't expect ordinary folks from the Windows shell team to code at that level!

it probably took them too long in plan-mode to spec it all and then iterate on the plan-do-check cycle with copilot so they just said ship it as-is

(only slightly sarcastic here ^^)

Probably, though I wasn't even talking about AI, I was talking about Microsoft's objections to when Casey Muratori told them that Windows Terminal sucked and they should be able to write one that goes at 60fps easy. The Windows Terminal team said "It would take a team of PhDs to do that", so Casey wrote a basic, but 60fps, terminal emulator in like a long weekend.

thanks for the clarification!

That feature was never in windows 11. The taskbar and start menu in windows 11 are from a cancelled version of windows meant for Surface neo

I had to check the date on my phone as I was sure it was an April fools joke. After the absolute onslaught of negative feedback and the new term "Microslop", they put out an article saying you can now adjust the position of the taskbar. Unreal.

No, they put out an article saying that not right now but later this month or maybe next month, if you switch to a beta release, then possibly you'll be able to adjust the position of the taskbar. But at least they have screenshots!

> you can now move the taskbar to the left side of the screen

Windows 11 is finally catching up to MATE desktop (which is maintained possibly by a single guy from their basement), what a time to be alive!

Hell, taskbar positioning was a feature on Windows 10. They're just pretending like they didn't remove it for brownie points.

10 … 8.1, 8… 7, XP… 2000, 98… maybe 95…

Indeed, as illustrated in Inside Windows 95, Microsoft Press, 1994:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_microsoftwindows951994...

Windows 11 is catching up to Windows XP.

It's kinda hilarious that this is the result of the leadership at MSFT. Great example of why the current crop of corporate leadership needs to be taxed into oblivion and have their fiefdoms divided for the masses. Their reign needs to swiftly end.

It might sound like a joke but it's because they are re-adding a feature they had in Windows 95, why was it removed? One can only speculate but given the pervasiveness of webviews in places where there used to be plain (and performant) win32 stuff, one is led to the conclusion that the recently on-boarded interns simply can't write any C++.

The more likely sounding conclusion is that everyone non-technical at Microsoft (sales, marketing, design, product management) uses macOS and assumes “look like macOS” is automatically good and they’ve never considered anything else.

There’s nothing about C++ which makes it “the only programming language which can draw things on the left”.

Probably for the same reason why Google keeps removing customizable features from Chrome. The more of them you have, the harder it is to test the product due to all kinds of unforeseen interactions between them. Someone probably said, "there's 10'000 lines of 30-year-old window positioning code we have to maintain, let's replace them with 1'000 lines of fresh window positioning code, then we'll have more leeway to add more Copilot features into the Start menu".

Microsoft's "Legs are coming to the Metaverse" moment...

i sorely miss the taskbar repositioning on my work laptop but seeing them start their article with this is deeply unserious

I left Windows long ago for Linux, but TFA leading with this had me questioning whether it was an April Fool's joke they let out early.

… this was a feature in Windows 95. I didn't even realize they'd removed it! Is the author too young to remember a time when the start bar was positionable…?

… to then follow "we listed to your feedback" with "more AI everywhere" … it's satire … right? Right?!

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