You Looked.

Microsoft doesn’t want you to use the vertical taskbar in Windows, or so it seems.

As the number of widescreens in the computer market increases, more and more people have begun experimenting with ways to make most of their screen estate. The easiest method to accomplish this is to drag your taskbar such that it lines up vertically along the left/right edge of the screen. This simple trick helps the purpose because most websites (including this one) have a limited width and thus fit on one’s screen perfectly despite the taskbar taking some extra space. At the same time, it gives your document some extra “height” providing more readability. Elegant and effective. If you haven’t tried it yet, you must (if you can put up with some annoyances; read further).

Now, even though the widescreen trend is no secret, Microsoft refuses to give its vertical taskbar the same importance it gives to the horizontal one. Let me begin with Vista. The Vista taskbar aligned sideways was enough reason for one to bang his head against the wall. The text next to the program icons was cropped off, so that you’d only see “Gm..” for Gmail (opened in firefox), “No…” for Notepad and so on. The cropped text was so useless, one would figure why it was even there. Searching for relevant windows amongst multiple ones was quite painful to say the least. But this was not the only problem, there were bugs. Every now and then, a program that was designed to slide notifications out of the taskbar would screw Vista and I’d get that annoying “Program stopped working” window. Even worse, if I got enough windows open to fill the entire taskbar, my programs in the taskbar would just flip out, literally. They’d start randomly swapping with pre-existing windows and what not. I would have loved to talk about ways to reproduce that error, but heavens be praised, I have Windows 7 now.

Windows 7 came with a whiff of fresh air. And the first thing I noticed about it was the new taskbar. Coup de Foudre. The Quick Launch toolbar and the taskbar had been combined, and there were large beautiful icons in the taskbar. It’s resemblance to the Mac’s dock could not be discounted, but well, it was still very beautiful. The die-hard fanatic of utilizing screen estate that I was, I switched to the vertical taskbar in no time. And this time, it was working beautifully. No more cropped texts, no more searching for windows. There were large beautiful icons telling me where I had every window open. And notifications slid out and in, like a sword from a sheath. It all looked as if it was meant to be.

But then, new operating systems generally look perfect. As I installed and pinned more programs to the taskbar on my new operating system, my taskbar started running out of space. And then, one fine day, I sadly realized that Microsoft had again chosen to neglect the vertical taskbar. :(

Here’s a quick showdown of what I’m talking about. Click any image to see it in bigger resolution, if you feel the need to do so.

In Windows 7, here’s a horizontal taskbar that is on the verge of getting full.

Now, when you pin a few more programs, the taskbar adjusts the space allotted to each pinned item, and squeezes in the extra icons. Neat! (At 1280 x 800, maximum programs that can be pinned are 20)

If however, you choose to further stress the taskbar, it gives way to 2 small buttons at the end of the pinned programs, that help you switch between rows of pinned items. It is very irritating to switch between rows using these tiny buttons, but then I must add that I was running out of programs to pin when trying to stress my horizontal taskbar. In short, you’ll probably never see the face of those tiny buttons unless you try and pin everything!

So like I said, clicking on such a tiny button so far to the right to switch between active programs can be quite frustrating, and it would make perfect sense to make your taskbar bigger. When you do that, as expected, the extra icons wrap around in the extra space that you just created. Problem solved!

Now, here’s the deal (no deal rather) with the vertical taskbar. In Image A below, you see a screenshot of the vertical taskbar in Windows 7 about to get full.

However, this time when you add an extra icon, the taskbar makes no attempt to accommodate it and conveniently fits this new icon into a second column, which as expected, is accessible only by pressing a small button at the end of all these pinned items. (Image B)

I can live with that too, but what happens next is absolutely shocking. Expanding the taskbar, to let a second column open up doesn’t work. (Image C) Expanding the taskbar stretches the icons without creating space for a second column, forcing you to depend upon the two tiny buttons to switch columns. On a 1280 x 800 screen, where I would clearly not mind giving up enough screen space to the taskbar to be working at 1050×800, Microsoft gives me no helping hand. At my resolution, I’m stuck to pinning at most 13 (how about 666 next time, Microsoft?) icons vertically, which is quite a shame considering that the very way to exploit this taskbar is by pinning items. If you use your computer fairly enough, this space is going to fill up sooner than you realize.

It seems to me that Microsoft is not doing some basic things right which it is very easily capable of. Not that this thing is going to hurt them, but it’s just the kind of thing that makes the difference between someone finding a product just right and another left asking for that little bit more.

Didn’t find what you were looking for? Leave a comment and I’ll try getting back to you on that.