Don’t you just love it when Microsoft bakes in some hidden configurations? It did just now, as it continues its experimentations with the good old taskbar in Windows 11.
Not too long ago, we got some refreshed taskbar animations that the company quickly removed. But now keen users have discovered a new hidden configuration that engineers have built into the OS to allow for faster taskbar reloading.
If you are a Windows 11 user, you may be aware of the painfully slow reload of the taskbar and its icons.
Apparently, Microsoft is aware of this inconvenience and wants to fix it by launching the taskbar parallel to the Immersive Shell. By doing so, the software titan hopes to effectively reduce the time the operating system takes to run the taskbar and enable its icons.
As for the changes, this video illustrates it best:
Something interesting in build 25182 – enabling the 39751186 ID makes the taskbar load faster (the animation is faster and less smooth when it is enabled). Here's a video: pic.twitter.com/YAX2HoWYE4
— phantomofearth 🌳 (@phantomofearth) August 22, 2022
Pretty slick!
This change is available in Windows 11 build 25182, which was released last week. It can be enabled by turning on a flag on a hidden configuration using ViveTool.
Extract the tool, launch Windows Terminal as an Administrator, and switch to the Command Prompt profile. Then navigate to the Vive folder using the cd command like cd c:\Vive\.
Now, simply type vivetool /enable /id:39751186 here and hit the Enter key. Restart Windows Explorer to see the new configuration in action. If you want to revert back to the previous one, just replace the enable command above with disable.
Once you complete these steps, you will notice that the taskbar launches faster without its default fly-up animation, which slowed things down.
What we don’t know right now is whether this is an intentional feature that Microsoft has been developing or just a side effect of an experiment that the company is conducting and will formally introduce at a later date.
In any case, you can try both variants right now and decide for yourself which one works better.
