The redesigned taskbar in Windows 11 has received a fair amount of praise and criticism since the October 2021 Update was released, but a year on, Microsoft is working on some improvements.
While a new (and much-needed) drag-and-drop feature for the Start menu is still missing on the fly, the look of the system tray in the lower-right corner is being refreshed to better reflect the look of tabs in Windows 11.
There’s also the ability to finally reduce the number of “recommended” files in the Start menu, but there’s still some way to go before the menu can be fully customized.
if you are Windows Insider (opens in new tab)which allows you to try other updates Microsoft is working on, but as for when the improvements will arrive, it could be after the Windows 11 2022 update.
Can we get rid of the Recommendations pane next?
For many Windows 11 users, the taskbar has always been a divisive — the taskbar and start menu are arguably an iconic part of the operating system since it debuted in Windows 95.
Anyone who’s ever used a PC knows where the Start menu is and how it works, so it’s inevitable that the big changes Windows 11 introduces will cause some discussion. Yet again, Microsoft has been slow to acknowledge these complaints from some users, to its detriment.
It’s been almost a year since Windows 11 debuted, and the taskbar has barely improved. To make matters worse, a former Microsoft engineer also expressed his frustration with the Start menu in a series of tweets in August.
Design matters. Details matter. Especially in such an iconic UI as the Windows Start menu. I remember the team created a special ligature in the Segoe UI font (used in Windows) to align the “S” and “t” perfectly with the word “start”. That’s how important Start is to Microsoft.August 29, 2022
Sure, some of the improvements we’ve seen in earlier versions of the upcoming Windows 11 update are welcome, but the “Recommended” section of the Start menu is the worst part for me. I don’t need to see a list of recently used files, and now, deleting those files means I have to right-click each file individually to delete them from the Start menu.
Let’s look at an option to remove it and have the icon overlay the menu, or maybe a couple of widgets like the weather.
While we may see some improvements in the Moment 2 update by the end of the year, you can customize the Start menu with Start11, a utility that also restores menus from previous Windows versions. While we wait and see what Microsoft plans, it could be a good option.
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