My Problem with the Windows 7 Taskbar

I don't expect i'm the first person to piece this conclusion together. In fact, I hope thousands of beta testers have done so and made noise about it. I just can't seem to find any, but this is one of those topics that seems difficult to search for.

The Taskbar, in trying to be more dock like now holds on to applications I want quick access to when they're closed. This is great. The concept of the new Taskbar is sound. The implementation is not flexible, or perhaps, not yet, or at very least not clearly.

There are a plethora of Windows applications that opt to live in what until 2009, everybody called the System Tray. Windows 7 calls this the Notification Area. Whether this is really a change or whether this was always the technical name I have no idea, but this area is certainly repurposed in 7 for the type of use that it got way back before everyone decided they should put an icon down there. Yahoo and AOL, i'm frowning at you.

My Twitter tool of choice is twhirl and it provides a perfect example of the problem i'd like to illustrate.

I open twhirl. I like it and want easy access, so I choose to "pin it to taskbar" in 7. I now have a launcher twhirl icon down there when I close the application. I click it, and as my settings dictate, the application starts with an open window. The same taskbar area now becomes a running twhirl application - at this precise point we're seeing classic behavior since Memphis back in 95 (or was it 94/96?) right here.

I'm now aware that some german dude actually SPAT at @techcrunch's face then ran away, courtesy of Hugh MacLeod, which I ponder and absorb.. seems a little extreme... and i'm ready to get on with some work. A click of the cross in twhirl like most applications will close it completely. You could argue it's then accessible to me on the taskbar, but unfortunately, it's no longer going to notify me of new tweets, quite simply because it won't be running, so instead I choose to minimise it. It is at this point things go wrong. It heads down and right to the Notification Area.

The icon on the taskbar reverts to a launcher! If the application allowed it, clicking this would launch another instance. Because it doesn't, clicking it does nothing. The only way I get twhirl back is to click the little Notification Area arrow and click the twhirl icon in there. I can also then choose to show it in the tray section eliminating one click. As soon as I click the notification icon, the taskbar launcher becomes a running application again.

So, what purpose does putting twhirl on my taskbar serve? Launching it first time, then taking up space for no further gain. To keep click count down I actually end up with two twhirl icons in the bottom 30-40 pixels of my screen. One on the taskbar and one in the Notification Area.

That's the essence. Application developers can easily work around this by reworking their applications to use the taskbar in the traditional way and stay away from the tray, but maybe Microsoft could help. How about that little list of options under Customize in the Notification Area against each little icon gave me the option to "Pin to taskbar". Unless MS realise that these two areas need to be able to relate, I fear many applications will never behave ideally pinned to the taskbar. Enough said.

Two more taskbar gripes in fewer words:

1. I can't pin just anything down there. File shortcuts head into a catchall context menu under Explorer, an icon which I probably don't want there at all. Control Panel shortcuts won't pin at all. I used to keep a shortcut to "Sound" down there to switch quickly between speakers and HDMI output. No way to do this here short of reinstating a quick launch toolbar down there, which is a messy solution, though it works.

2. Frequent Firefox occurrence. You browse and end up downloading something. You don't close the Download window. Hours later you close your browser window(s) leaving just the Download window. Firefox is still running, but that's fine with you. In the past I could now relaunch Firefox and the remainder of the instance would resurrect itself. Indeed I can still do this from any normal shortcut to firefox.exe or by launching it directly, however I can't launch it from my preferred pinned icon on the taskbar because until that last window is closed, the still running application remains. I must close the Download window to obtain my launcher icon to launch from scratch. Actually by far the best thing to solve this would be for Mozilla to stop creating a taskbar placeholder for every single window in Firefox that would be better off a child, so I won't so much fault Microsoft here.

Disjointed, but there's a real interface problem here. I hope the taskbar isn't final yet.