Windows’ murderous Task Manager appears to be getting a makeover in Windows 11 after a work-in-progress surfaced in the latest Insider Dev Channel build.
Reminder of the good times
The build, 22538, is an otherwise relatively mundane release from the Windows team.
Of course, there was great excitement among the community when the volume control dating back to the days of Windows 8 was ditched in favor of something more in tune with the world of Windows 11 (you can now change the volume with your mouse or touchpad). But Task Manager has kept its latest redesign so far and still looks like a throwback to Windows of yesteryear.
That assumes users can actually find it. Notoriously, Microsoft removed the familiar right-click-on-the-taskbar approach from earlier for Windows 11 and adopted a slightly strange right-click-on-the-start-button method instead.
The original Task Manager was a utility developed by former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer that first appeared in Windows NT 4. “Task Manager,” Plummer says, “is honestly a natural born killer.”
Or at least it was, until the poor thing degenerated as Windows evolved. The inability to be as murderous as Plummer originally intended these days has led to gnashing of teeth by administrators and a “You had to kill the unresponsive tasks, don’t join” meme.
Still, no trace of Windows 10’s sometimes tangled UI should remain, and this is undoubtedly why Microsoft is tinkering with the look and feel of the Task Manager, as noted by @FireCubeStudios with credit to other users, including: @gus33000 (Gustave Monce – notable for other tinkering, including booting Windows 11 on a Lumia 950 XL phone.)
We managed to get the work in progress, and yes – it does indeed appear that Microsoft is considering redesigning the Task Manager to better suit the Windows 11 aesthetic.
However, the new design can’t really be described as functional at this stage (and wouldn’t be dissuaded from his belief that we were running on a Surface Pro 8). It seems that after the redesign of Notepad, nothing is sacred in the eyes of the Windows behemoth.
Aside from hidden extras, the new build also includes updates to the voice access feature and a fix to prevent Explorer from crashing for some users when hardware volume buttons are pressed. Interestingly enough, there was also a fix for “an issue affecting the reliability of Task Manager”.
Unfortunately, we had to deal with one of the known issues: there are two arrows on our taskbar for the hidden icon flyout and text and icons are misaligned. Microsoft recommended a reboot, which had no effect for us. But hey, this is development code after all. ®