Want to move the Windows 11 taskbar to the side or top of the screen? Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t plan on creating an official way to do that anytime soon.
The issue came up during a Q&A session on Windows 11 last week, which was spotted by Neowin. According to Microsoft product manager Tali Roth, developing such a customizable taskbar would be a complex undertaking.
“When you think about having the taskbar on the right or on the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to have a wonderful experience in those environments is just huge,” she said during the video session.
The Windows 11 team is also prioritizing upcoming features rather than reworking older ones. “While we know there’s this set of people that love [the movable taskbar] and really appreciate it, we also recognize that set of users is really small compared to the set of other folks who are asking for other features,” Roth said.
“So at the moment, we are continuing to focus on things that I hear more pain around,” she added. “It’s one of those things that we are continuing to look at, and we’ll keep listening to feedback. But at the moment we don’t have a plan or a set date for when we would, or if we would, actually build the side tile.
So, if a movable taskbar is a make-or-break deal for you, you may want to stick with Windows 10, which supports switching the taskbar to the side or to the top of the screen. On Windows 11, all your icons are center-aligned on the taskbar by default, though you can shift it to the left. Another option is to manually use Windows 11's registry editor to alter where the taskbar shows up.
Although it may not seem like it, Roth said the taskbar in Windows 11 is an entirely new creation that focuses on faster loading and other improvements. “When we built Windows 11, we rebuilt the taskbar from scratch. And so that meant we had to pick and choose which things we would put in first,” she said.
“And so our goal is to be really data driven when it comes to making the decisions about what to include and what we could either put off for later or not include,” Roth added. “And so when you look at taskbar, the set of things that we are working on right now are things that we are hearing about a lot of user pain around.”