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 the Windows user interface, but the key complaints above prove that the firm might have gone too far. Rather than trying to please everyone with a single interface, however, Microsoft should do what I thought it was going to do when it later added the Windows 10X user interface (now the Windows 11 UI) to “big” Windows 10: make it optional and let the user choose between both. But there’s an even better approach that will require more work on Microsoft’s part: it can add a power user UI option to Windows 11 that would let more sophisticated users toggle on the missing features they need. This will require a complex dashboard of some kind.

What’s interesting about these suggestions, of course, is that they’re all UI-related. That makes sense: ultimately, Windows 11 is nothing more than a new UI on top of Windows 10, with no major structural or foundational changes at all. For the initial release, and for the short term, that’s fine. But over time, I’d like to see Windows 11 get more sophisticated. And the key way it can do that is to adopt the container-based underpinnings that Microsoft was originally going to use for Windows 10X. This is not an easy change, like much of the above, and it can’t be implemented until and unless it works well. But I hope Microsoft hasn’t given up on this technology.

And on that note, I know that not everyone will agree with all of these changes. And that some of you will have ideas of your own. So let us all know what you think. Yes, it’s too late to fix Windows 11 for its initial release, but it’s not too late to ensure that the Windows 11 we’re using a year from now is considerably better.