I recently got an ultra wide screen and realised that the Windows taskbar is a bit of waste. Let me explain.
On an ultra wide screen, the task bar will be very likely just empty most of the time, taking up the precious Y axis of the screen:
Since there are many more pixels on the X axis, we could put the task bar to the side. Sure that would make sense:
But did you notice how the taskbar is much wider when in vertical position? I thought this was because of the date but even when the clock and date are disabled, the width remains the same. Why?
And there is the inconvenience of having key areas in the opposite, quite far away corners – the Start Menu and the notifications panel.
Why not make a dynamic or floating task bar?
Auto-hiding is not an alternative. It takes much longer to hover over the task bar to show it than just quickly glance over in the corner of the screen. Also auto-hiding is sometimes buggy and does not work well when connected to over RDP from touch-enabled device – impossible to show the task bar in touch mode. over RDP.
This post was originally published on June 22, 2020.