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Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!
If you have working code, why would you rewrite it from scratch? Refactor, sure. Overhaul, maybe. But why rewrite the whole thing?! You're gaining nothing but unnecessary bugs.
I know all the joke answers. To justify a product manager's salary, because Microsoft gonna Microsoft, whatever. I want to know the real reason. Why would you ever rewrite working code from scratch if you don't have to?
Exactly. Full rewrites nearly always end in failure.
Probably to add something terrible for the user but good for MS. Ad integration? Easier to spy?
That's fair, but even with that, it's got to be easier to shove it into existing code. Especially if you're trying to do it in a way that people don't notice!
And actually, the Windows 10 start menu infamously had ads, too. So it can't be that.
Could be that refactoring the code for Windows 11 compatibility, and new features, would have been roughly equivalent in effort to rebuilding. If the code has been poked and probed for years already, still follows old patterns, and have devolved into a tightly coupled mess of scattered system dependancies… maybe it just becomes easier to justify rebuilding it as a way of clearing out technical debt?
The people responsible only had experience with React, so they rebuilt it using React.
I assume the code was just too old and convoluted to maintain properly. I'm a bad coder so I've definitely redone parts of my scripts from scratch rather than trying to refactor them.
Then again I'm not a small billion dollar indie company who's main focuses are spying on users and helping to commit genocide.
Someone on Microsoft probably needed an excuse for their pay increase.
"I rebuilt/had the idea to rebuilt the taskbar" sounds a lot better to managers than "I maintained the taskbar".
There exist some horror stories about the code but I have no idea how to find them.
They let their AI do it for them
But this was four years ago! Actually it was released four years ago. This decision was almost certainly made before there were widespread code assistance AIs.