When released, Windows 11 came with a bucketload of changes. A whole bunch of them were reserved for the main desktop, where the Start Menu and the Taskbar reside.
And while Microsoft has made a number of welcome changes to the Start Menu over the past few months, the company now seems to be focused on the taskbar. Over in the right corner, we have the system tray area, and it is seeing some action.
Long overdue action, at that, as this side of the OS still makes do with old legacy components.
Redmond has been trying to modernize the tray area of the taskbar in Windows 11 for some time now.
In fact, the early builds of version 22H2 carried a couple of changes in this regard, but the company decided not to proceed with them as doing so would have meant sacrificing certain features.
As you may recall, build 22581 introduced some of these changes to the system tray. However, they were soon reverted after users complained about the lack of functionality in moving and changing the position of the icons.
In the latest preview builds, Microsoft has once again started working on a cleaner and more modern look for the system tray area.
The idea here is to overhaul the underlying components of the system tray so that they benefit tablet users while allowing users greater control over notifications.
For this reason, the system tray area of the taskbar now uses modern flyouts when a user hovers over the icons.
This GIF shows the work being done:
To make the UI more suitable for tablet users, Microsoft now provides the ability to entirely disable the tray menu and its icons. This can be done by locating the new option added in Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Other system tray icons and toggling the “Hide icon menu.”
Doing so will disable all the icons, leaving only indicators like network/WiFi, volume, battery, and input language visible on the taskbar.
Of course, this change, once again, removes the ability to rearrange the order of the taskbar icons via drag and drop. However, since Microsoft still appears to be working on this idea, there is a chance that this functionality will be restored before the wider rollout.
Since Windows 11 does not have a dedicated tablet mode, these are the best options we have for owners of Windows-powered slates.
