Looking forward to a future Windows 11 update that will finally allow you to change the location of its beautiful taskbar? Don’t hold your breath, as a recent AMA session on YouTube has suggested that Microsoft doesn’t really give a damn about giving users the freedom of choice and being able to shift the menu away from the bottom of the screen. Tali Roth, Microsoft’s Head of Product, has claimed that restoring the classic feature could invite all sorts of challenges for the operating system’s UI designers, such as how the listing and look of apps might react to the taskbar being set at different edges of the screen. Roth confirmed that Microsoft has no plans to restore the feature at the moment, claiming that it’s only relevant to a small number of Windows 11 users.
“When it comes to something like actually being able to move the taskbar to different locations on the screen, there’s a number of challenges with that,” Roth explained. “When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment is just huge.”
“And when you look at the data, while we know there is a set of people that love it that way and, like, really appreciate it, we also recognize that this set of users is really small compared to the set of other folks that are asking for other features,” Roth added. “So at the moment we are continuing to focus on things that I hear more pain around.”
“It is one of those things that we are still continuing to look at, and we will keep looking to feedback, but at the moment we do not have a plan or a set date for when we would, or if we should, actually build the side taskbar.”
Microsoft says changing taskbar location in Windows 11 is not important (Neowin)
The Start menu and taskbar are among the most controversial changes in Windows 11. Microsoft threw away the old taskbar during the development process and started making the new one from scratch. As a result, developers had to decide what features needed to be ready for the initial launch, what features they could postpone, and what features were not worth the effort. The option to move the taskbar fell into the last category.
The logic behind the explanation is easy to understand. Windows enthusiasts are quite a vocal yet relatively small community in the Windows install base with more than 1.3 billion devices. Microsoft needs to constantly balance satisfying its hardcore fans and keeping the priorities in check for the entire audience. Oftentimes, decisions Microsoft makes in favor of the larger group of users hurt the enthusiasts.
But the funny thing about the taskbar is that the Feedback Hub directly clashes with what Tali Roth has said. The ability to move the taskbar is the most upvoted feedback piece, with more than 17,600 thumb-ups and 1200 comments. Unless Microsoft has another tool to source more feedback from “regular” users, you can tell quite a large chunk of Windows 11 customers want Microsoft to bring back the missing feature more than everything else. People do not want stickers on the desktop. They want the taskbar they have lost.
Discussion (16 replies)
Join Discussion →You know what when I have to deal with hundreds of systems at any given time... I don't care about moving my task bar. That would be an EPIC pain in the butt. If I only had to deal with a couple systems at any point in time fine I'd be wanting the same to be honest.
Arn't there addon programs that let you reposition the task bar or like a regedit you can make to do the same?
https://www.howtogeek.com/759882/how-to-move-windows-11s-taskbar-to-the-top-of-the-screen/#:~:text=To%20manually%20make%20the%20taskbar,Registry%20Editor%E2%80%9D%20in%20the%20results.&text=Once%20you've%20navigated%20to,%E2%80%9CSettings%E2%80%9D%20key%20within%20it.
Extrapolate other positions on your own.
They are claiming users are asking for other features. How are they asking? Is mirosoft reading their brains? Because windows certainly never asked me what features I want. I'd say give back the ones you took away.
New Start menu sucks. I don't know why we have a new taskbar, it does less than the old one and seems twice as buggy and half as responsive. New right click contextual menus suck. New Settings panels suck. Teams and Edge and OneDrive are everywhere, which sucks. There honestly hasn't been anything to like in Windows 11, apart from the fact that I didn't have to pay anything extra for it. The only semi-bright spot I can think of is that Cortana finally isn't pushed on you like a free hooker.
I guess change for the sake of change?
At least I'll get DirectStorage, so I can see that 0.2 second increase in my load times!!! Assuming any game I care to play actually comes out and supports it.
This is just ... how about hiring better UI engineers? I mean, it was never an issue in previous versions. Having your precious UI support 90-180-270 degrees rotation shouldn't be rocket surgery. I do backend though, I am not an UI expert.
I am pretty sure the Feedback Hub has this functionality built in (not the mind reading :ROFLMAO:). But I always uninstall it. I have seen a setting for how often MS can ask for your feedback at least.
Ex-Microsoft lead says he "fought hard" to save the vertical taskbar on Windows 11
Summary
https://www.xda-developers.com/ex-m...ueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
[embedded media]
Windows 11 is finally giving users a feature they’ve begged for since launch
News
By Zac Bowden published 3 days ago
Microsoft is planning to bring back the ability to move and resize the Taskbar on Windows 11 as part of its effort to improve sentiment around the OS this year.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-11-gaining-movable-taskbar-in-2026
*Microsoft did not respond for comment on these plans.
Moving the task bar can be useful. But nothing matters, reality is, ms can do whatever, and nothing will happen to them. Its just weird that the care for cool things is gone. Its been gone for a while, we are in the era of control, and take it or leave it.
That's what every "too big to fail" company thinks, until something happens to them. XBOX is already a dead brand. Windows can be too. I didn't think it possible even a year ago, but moving to Linux doesn't seem that far fetched now. And not because linux became so much better, but because windows has become so much worse and continues to get even worse. Every update is a gamble now whether your computer will even boot after it.
Or their latest bright idea: Dropping support for older printers,
and somehow that's supposed to be a good thing?!
The year of linux has been at play since 1991. That said linux is in fact everywhere but the desktop, i think is a fair prediction to say that desktops as we know them will most likely die before the year of linux as it was originally referenced to.
So yeah windows on the desktop might dodo themselves together.
Desktops are fully giving way to powerful laptops for corporate and educational use. It's just too convenient.
DIY market of monolithic systems on desks to do heavy compute or gaming is swiftly moving to the cloud base services. (You will own nothing and like it crowd.) I just want to convince my corporate masters to keep me in bleeding edge tech for my deck and jack... I mean.... well fuck it I want a data jack! ;)
I did not predict the year of linux I predict the end of windows. Normies have already abandoned desktop PCs for smartphones and tablets. GenZ never even used it to begin with
They keep saying this but cloud is simply DOA. For big compute usually means big data, so bandwidth and storage makes the cloud impractical and much slower. Not to mention the cost of terabytes of SSD storage on cloud. And for gaming they'd need faster than light communications to make the lag bearable. Not to mention the bandwidth cost (again) for decent IQ.
I think we are now ready for Linux. problem is finding cheap hardware for a build. that will be beyond 2030
for reference, based on current distros, these are some grok suggestions
This is true. If it weren't for Office for work and gaming I wouldn't need Windows at all.
Steam is doing more for moving that ship than anything. And Office is debatable, I can run most of that on a Mac at least.
The OS doesn't really matter much anymore - as it should have been all along. It really just needs to bootstrap the computer up and give you an interface to launch stuff.
I've been looking hard as my next personal laptop being a mac.
Woooow, I did not even know that in Win11 you couldn't move or resize the taskbar! What the fuuuuuck?! How do you take a normal feature from past Windows OSes and then just remove it for no f*cking reason?
Microsoft themselves were the ones who convinced me to start using Linux as my main OS. Thanks Microsoft! It's been a few years now, and I am NOT going back. Windows 7 was the last Windows OS that I used as a main OS. I still dual-boot and use Windows for some things, but the vast majority of my PC usage time is in Linux now. If Microsoft hadn't kept f*cking Windows up, making each one after 7 worse and worse (well 10 was better than 8, but still overall downhill trajectory), I'd probably still be 100% on Windows. I'm glad that ship has sailed though. I f*cking love Linux! And I owe it all to Microsoft and their incompetence.
The distros I use these days are Manjaro and CachyOS.
Gawd that's such a f*cking weird thing to read. I'm headed towards 50, and I've been basically living on desktop PCs since I my early teenage years. I hate touchscreens, I barely use my smartphone as anything more than a phone (I guess it's also my camera), and I didn't even start using laptops until the 2010s (still don't like them, but they can be handy from time to time). I am 100% a desktop PC guy, and I will be for life.