- Microsoft has applied a useful fine tuning on the taskbar in a new preview -Build
- When there are many app icons on the taskbar, they need to be downscale intelligently to fit in more
- It avoids being forced to flood excess appicons to a secondary menu where they may be lost – but you don’t have to activate this behavior
Windows 11 seems to be set to another fine -tuning to the taskbar, which will be convenient for those who like to juggle a lot of apps and keep a lot of those running at once.
It’s just by testing for now, but the fresh introduction to a preview of Windows 11 in the Beta channel (which is highlighted by The Verge) is a feature called TaskBar icon scaling.
What usually happens when you open a lot of apps is that when Windows 11 comes to the point where it can’t show all icons, the overflow will be separated in a popout (secondary) menu.
But with the new task icon behavior, what happens instead happens that Windows 11 intelligently will trim the icons down and scale their size so that several of them can appear at once in the taskbar.
Other notable changes in this new beta -building (version 26120.3671) include an ability to help you share files more easily. This kicks in when you pull a file from a folder on which a tray pops up at the top of the screen and offers a selection of apps that you can drop that file directly to share it directly.
For those with Copilot+ PCS, Microsoft is also changing its still controversial recall function so it has a “Basic Search History” added and click to make now a ‘ash copilot’ option.
Analysis: Added Taskbares Smarts but only if you want them
The way the taskbar currently works in Windows 11 is not ideal for situations where you have a heavy strain of app use. In these scenarios, some of these applications are turned off elsewhere to the secondary menu, and you may even forget that you’ve made them run because of it. Or at least it’s a bit clumsy when you want to switch to a given app and you can’t find it at the bar, so you have to click through, wait for the secondary menu to appear and then find the application there.
Less, intelligent scaled icons solve this problem, but of course the disadvantage of shrinking app icons is that they become harder to see, at least if you go too far. Therefore, of course, Microsoft has made this for a choice – if better visibility is crucial to you, you do not need to activate task scaling.
There is an option to have it turned on or off, and a third choice to use only the feature when the taskbar is full (which is probably what the majority of users who like this idea will plump for).
This is a useful change, so although one from Apple’s Playbook – that’s how Makos handles appicons on the dock – and hopefully it’s a fine tuning that doesn’t take too long to get through to the release version of Windows 11. Especially also hidden in the background of recent preview, which is a much larger movement for another core element in Windows 11 – In this case – in this case is the starting male, Get the change that I am most desperate to see.
