Let’s Fix Windows 11 (Premium)

Just days from now, Windows 11 will ship in an incomplete, regressive state. That’s too bad, but fixing Windows 11 is easy. And while I expect Microsoft to make most of these fixes in the coming months, when user feedback finally starts impacting the product, I think it’s worth being proactively constructive now.

My most obvious and general idea is to make the user interface truly consistent. Not sort-of consistent, actually consistent. And that work should start with context menus: There are still too many context menu styles in Windows 11, and while Microsoft has already fixed some of this in the Dev channel---like the old-fashioned menu that appears when you right-click Recycle Bin---there is much more out there. For example, when using Dark mode, you can right-click the Tab actions menu in Edge and see a white context menu, but when you right-click elsewhere (like a tab), you see a dark context menu. Come on.

Getting a bit more specific, it’s astonishing how badly Microsoft kneecapped a key Windows interface: I’m referring, of course, to the taskbar. Key among them are regressions, like the inability to drag-and-drop documents and other files onto icons for open applications and the inability to position the taskbar on the screen edge of your choice. But there’s so much more. You can’t right-click Search, Task view, Widgets, or Chat to remove them; you need to open Settings first. You can’t get to Task Manager by right-clicking the taskbar anymore. (And no, right-clicking Start doesn’t count.) And you can’t even resize the taskbar.

The new Default Apps interface in Windows 11 is a tragedy of, shall we say, antitrust proportions. And while some web browser makers have already reverse-engineered Microsoft’s anti-competitive system, that shouldn’t be necessary: Windows 11 should simply respect the user’s choice and literally make the web browser they choose to be the default for all web browser activities. Period.

The new Chat feature, which is sometimes called Chat from Microsoft Teams, is a mistake: Teams doesn’t work well with Microsoft accounts, and Skype is a better solution for that audience. My advice: make Chat a front-end to Skype and Teams, use the former by default if the user signs in with a Microsoft account.

The new Quick Settings interface is a direct rip-off of the same feature in Chrome OS, but that’s fine, and I like the way it works. The new Notifications pane, however, is a mistake, mostly because Microsoft comingles it, unnecessarily, with a non-interactive calendar flyout that is often collapsed by default and thus useless. The fix here is simple, at least for notification: Return an Action Center-like button to the right of the date/time display in the taskbar and make that trigger the Notifications pane. Then, return the calendar flyout to the date/time display; and then make it interactive like it was in Windows 10.

I appreciate Microsoft’s attempts at simplifying th...