The new design
A nyone who caught a glimpse of the Windows 10X screenshots that Microsoft released earlier this year won’t be overcome with shock when they flip through the pages of this feature. Microsoft said it was plunging the work on Windows 10X into nextgeneration Windows and it meant it.
The styling is a notable breakaway from Windows past, without completely tipping over the apple cart. And after you’ve started playing around with Windows 11 for a while, you begin to notice subtle details such as rounded corners on windows, greater use of transparency (not the only Vista throwback) and new icons sprinkled through the OS.
Here, we dive into the detail of what’s changed with the design of Windows 11 – and what hasn’t.
THE TASKBAR
The new taskbar is the change that smacks you in the face the moment the Windows 11 desktop first appears.
It’s got much more of a macOS Dock vibe, with the icons now centred at the foot of the display. Windows fundamentalists have already threatened to march on Redmond because of this “outrage”, but they should lay down their pitchforks – the taskbar settings allow you to have the icons left-justified in the traditional style if you prefer. Everyone take a deep breath.
We found we got used to having the Start button and icons centred in pretty short order, not least because we normally use keyboard shortcuts to activate the Start menu, rather than clicking on the icon itself. But it’s sensible for Microsoft not to enforce this change.
There are four icons on the left-hand side of the taskbar: the Start button, Search, Task View and the new Widgets icon (more on which below). Three other taskbar icons
(File Explorer, Edge, Windows Store) also appear by default, but they can’t be moved to the left of the other three. In other words, you won’t lose your Start button in a jumble of other desktop icons.
The active window is still highlighted in the taskbar, but Windows 11 puts a short, Mac-like marker against icons where there’s a window open but not active.
THE START MENU
The Start menu has also been given a serious makeover. Gone are the Live Tiles that were introduced with Windows 8 and have been endlessly tweaked since. Microsoft never really made them work. They were too high maintenance, too noisy and few will mourn their passing.
The Start Menu is separated into Pinned icons for apps and Microsoft’s Recommended apps. Icons can be dragged around the Pinned menu, so you can place your favourites in whichever order you choose. You can also click a button to get a list of every app installed on your PC, similar to that in Windows 10.
Devoting so much space in the Start Menu to Microsoft’s Recommended apps is likely to prove as popular as a kick in the shins. In the beta, it appears that Microsoft basically recommends apps or files on your system that it thinks you’re looking for, but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this will also be used to plug apps from the Microsoft Store. We can’t find a way to switch the recommendations off at present, but we hope that changes.
SEARCH
Windows Search has been troubled throughout the Windows 10 era, with Microsoft first trying to shoehorn the now retired Cortana in at every opportunity before quietly ushering her out of the back door. Windows 11
Search – activated from the taskbar icon or the Win+S shortcut – has a revamped pop-up menu that takes up a good chunk of the screen.
It’s an all-encompassing search system, able to return results from your apps, files, settings or the wider web. Results appear in a panel on the right-hand side and can be refined using the options down the left-hand side. It has worked well in our beta tests although there’s a danger of information overload, with Microsoft trying too hard to deliver results from multiple sources when all you wanted is the document you were working on yesterday.
The Windows 10 PowerToy, called PowerToys Run, delivered a much simplified search bar that was very similar to the Mac’s Spotlight search and much less intrusive. It feels like an opportunity missed.
TASK VIEW
The Task View icon has had a revamp and so has the menu. The thumbnails for new desktops now appear at the foot of the screen, with the option to select from different windows on those desktops still taking up the bulk of the display.
As with latter-day versions of Windows 10, the option to scroll back through recent application and file history has been scrubbed from this menu. We suspect Microsoft’s telemetry revealed that this was a little-used feature and so it’s history itself, although the “recommended” section of the new Start Menu does seem to suggest documents and files you’ve been recently working on. Jump Lists, which often store recently used files, are also still a thing.
WIDGETS
Windows are back – and nobody puts these widgets into a corner. Clicking on the Widgets icon in the Taskbar (or pressing Win+W) sees a transparent panel slide out from the left-hand side of the screen and take up almost half of the display.
In the leaked beta, these widgets are wholly Microsoft’s own – a weather forecast, a stock ticker, sports results and a stream of news from Microsoft’s Bing network.
Microsoft aims to eventually open Widgets to third parties, as it did with the Desktop Gadgets that made a fleeting appearance in Windows Vista. We hope it does because there’s little to sustain interest for such a huge chunk of screen space at the moment.
SNAP LAYOUTS AND SNAP GROUPS
Arguably the most interesting new interface innovation in Windows 11 is the Snap Layouts tool. If you hover over the icon that flicks windows between full and part-screen mode, you now get a variety of different layouts to pick from.
You can, for example, choose to shove the window into the left half of the screen, the bottom quarter, or so that it dominates two thirds of the screen. There are several different screen layouts to choose from and it’s a much more straightforward way of rearranging windows than dragging them to the side of the screen or manually resizing.
The nice thing about Snap Layouts is that Windows 11 remembers them if you open a window that’s not in the current layout. So, you can open another app full screen, then hover over the taskbar icon of any app in the previous layout and select that Snap Group, going back to the original layout (so you don’t have to reposition every window again if you leave that layout).
Whilst we’re talking about arranging windows, the option to grab the title bar of a window and give it a shake to minimise all other open windows has now been switched off by default. You can switch it back on in Settings (search for “shake” and the