Microsoft confirms taskbar in Windows 11 no longer supports drag and drop

This was genuinely one of the more intuitive parts of the task bar. Although I&#x27;m aware that you can pin applications to the task bar by right clicking. I surely hope they give alternative ways to pin stuff.<p>But in the article, here&#x27;s what&#x27;s pissing me off:<p>&gt; In Windows 11, the taskbar lost some other quite popular features users enjoyed in Windows 10. For example, you can no longer move the taskbar to the top, right, or left.<p>Now I&#x27;m not a user of this feature. But in my immediate circle, no less than 6 of the many people I know work with windows (maybe 30 folks ?) use the task bar on the left or right (they have different monitor setups)<p>Sure, it&#x27;s at best anecdotal, not very significant, but it&#x27;s been there since the dawn of Windows ... That&#x27;s really bound to piss off some people

&gt; In Windows 11, the taskbar lost some other quite popular features users enjoyed in Windows 10. For example, you can no longer move the taskbar to the top, right, or left.<p>I have a feeling this is gonna be the big issue for some people. I personally just leave it at the bottom, but there&#x27;s something to be said that when you have a standard 16:9 monitor, it doesn&#x27;t make sense to remove that space from the vertical axis when most content is already too wide for that aspect ratio.

&gt; If this controversial change frustrates you, as well as thousands of other insiders, make sure to send your feedback to Microsoft.<p>Or, just don&#x27;t use windows 11. I certainly won&#x27;t. I&#x27;m only using win10 as it is because they don&#x27;t care if you use an unauthorized copy for free. At this point my camel&#x27;s back is a needle away from switching to linux&#x2F;mac.

For me the inability to move the taskbar on the left side would be a no go. Vertical space on a 16:9 monitor is too precious. Maybe this will be the time I finally rotate my monitor

The lack of vertical taskbar is so mind bogglingly stupid, I don&#x27;t know what to say.

There are two issues here: 1. The task bar, application, and process metaphor in Windows is not conducive to drag-and-drop onto taskbar items. Dropping onto an exe would start a process and pass the file as an argument, but doing this onto a window doesn&#x27;t make sense. Does it start a new process from the file the window&#x27;s existing process is based on? This would rely on that program recognizing it&#x27;s already running and sending a message the other instance to open the dropped file then exit. If a program isn&#x27;t document-oriented, this could be even harder to tell what to do. Theoretically windows could send a drop message to the process passing the window handle...<p>2. I vaguely recall a patent issue in the 2000s around this issue. At the time, lots of drag-and-drop actions resulted in explicit error messages indicating Microsoft knew what the user wanted to do but that it wasn&#x27;t able to respond as the user intended. I quickly searched for the patent but could not find it.

For clarification, you can still reorder the icons you have pinned to the taskbar by dragging in Windows 11. And you can pin additional items from the Start Menu to the taskbar by right-clicking the app in the Start Menu, selecting More, and then Pin to taskbar. You can add items to the Start Menu by creating a shortcut within the &quot;%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu&quot; directory. Items added to the start menu like this can then be pinned to the taskbar using the method already mentioned.<p>Source: I just did all of this in the current Windows 11 Insider release as part of testing an upcoming PortableApps.com Platform release.<p>So, you can still pin just about anything to the taskbar, it&#x27;s just a more convoluted way of doing it than dragging. And, I&#x27;d wager, we&#x27;ll have third party utilities that will automate the above for folks who like to pin random items regularly. Heck, I may do it myself and stick it on github if people would like.

Reaffirming assumptions is a totally valid activity for a redesign of anything so long established, as Windows clearly is. However there are better ways to go about it than lop off widely used functionality and see how much people yell.<p>If you do it too much, users willing to give feedback will have less energy and nuance left for the really smart stuff, as they dig their heels in to fight hard for the simple things.

Having the taskbar at bottom of wide screen is waste of the valuable height! Where can I give Microsoft feedback without the Feedback Hub app?

Drag and drop was already abysmal on Windows compared to MacOS, things I take for granted on MacOS like dragging an image from a web browser to a photoshop document just don&#x27;t work. This is just another kick in the teeth for people who find this a fast and flexible way to work.

Interesting post about Win11 taskbar by the guy who&#x27;s made me forget that Windows taskbar has been hot garbage since 7:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rammichael.com&#x2F;7-taskbar-tweaker-and-a-first-look-at-windows-11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rammichael.com&#x2F;7-taskbar-tweaker-and-a-first-look-at...</a>

They killed drag and drop and changed right click menus from the recent files list on pinned apps. I knew I was going to hate this modern ui right then.<p>Sure it was a complex menu but it was so feature rich.

I&#x27;m still using a Windows XP style task bar which is about the same height in total but two rows.<p>The bottom rows has the currently open applications with the begining of the window title directly visible, the top row has a list of small icons for shortcuts to often used programs (maybe thirty or so).<p>I find this incredibly more productive than the redesigned taskbar with its huge square buttons and mixing of shortcuts and current windows.

Microsoft seems to have a knack for making Windows less useful and more annoying with every release.

Didn&#x27;t even know you could do that. Maybe Microsoft&#x27;s Telemetry figured out that not many people knew it also.

I just want to be able to drag taskbar items around in the taskbar like I can with Chrome tabs.<p>7+ Taskbar Tweaker lets you do this in Windows 10, even breaking out of window groups. XFCE lets you do it out of the box. XFCE does also let you drag files to the taskbar item to activate that window, which I do occasionally. I already switched to Manjaro everywhere for work though, so Microsoft can do whatever they want. Windows machines are just for games and watching streams in my house.

It reminds me during the last win10 update they added that stupid weather widget on the task bar.

Surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but this is a huge loss for accessibility.<p>After I started using Linux with Gnome, I realized how much less strain I was putting on my wrists with the taskbar&#x2F;launcher and window controls on the left. Since as a right-handed person, it, the angle of my wrist is at a much more comfortable angle, about 45 degrees facing inward. It&#x27;s way more natural to do a side to side swiping motion with your forearm than a jerky up and down motion when the taskbar is in the default bottom position and you&#x27;re switching between windows all day.<p>I only use Windows at work now but if they haven&#x27;t added this back by the time we have to upgrade to Windows 11, it&#x27;ll only be a matter of time before I start getting carpal tunnel symptoms again.<p>I bet there are others that have limited arm mobility that also rely on this customization that will be even more harmed by this.

In Windows 98-ish era I was using an alternative &quot;shells&quot; for Windows UI. First one was &quot;Geoshell&quot; IIRC, after that I used &quot;Blackbox&quot; for more minimalistic look and feel. Nice to see Microsoft opening a niche for alternative UI implementations again.

&gt; you can open a file by dragging it onto an app on the taskbar<p>I honestly thought this wasn&#x27;t true because it never worked when I tried it. Is the third party support for this feature just really lacking compared to macOS where it seems universal?

I&#x27;ve never once in all my years of using Windows dragged a file onto an application in the taskbar to open that file. I didn&#x27;t even know that was a thing you could do until this post.

Windows 11 really is shaping up to be the vista version. Look forward to windows 12 which will have all the good features without the annoying ones.<p>Microsoft really has a lock on the good-bad-good cadence.

Who knows. It could even be reduce features simply in order to reduce bug (and potential bug) counts which occur every time they fiddle with the UI.

hmmph. annoying. It is the best way for me to keep default file associations while still easily using a different program to open a file.<p>Most common example is to keep &quot;.jpg&quot; default for the faster, normal case and drag the file to photoshop if I absolutely have to.

Dreading the future Win11 corporate laptops that I&#x27;ll be assigned.<p>Hoping the myriad of public&#x2F;private services I rely upon will have dropped the &quot;Internet Explorer 11&#x2F;Windows&quot; requirement that keeps a single Windows PC lingering on my home network.

I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;ll just see a fork, as in any healthy software ecosystem. :)

Welcome to the glorious future everyone, where our computers are less featureful than they were in the 1990s.<p>Could all of you &quot;professional&quot; software &quot;engineers&quot; out there please just stop sucking so damned hard? You&#x27;re making me deeply ashamed to be a part of this industry.

Is it because it now is using a web view instead? and it&#x27;s too hard for the employees in charge to support native drag&amp;drop? xD