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What’s wrong with Windows 7’s Task Bar (or “Super Bar”)?

I’ve been using Windows 7 as my primary OS at home since 8/8/2009.  This is not the beta version.  This is the SAME version that will be released to the public in a few days on 10/22/2009.  One of the first things you notice that’s different from Vista is the task bar (also referred to now as the inaccurately named “SuperBar”).  If you had a quick launch bar in XP or Vista, it’s now gone.

To get it back, read this:

The new “super bar” is supposed to be better than the old task bar with the following explanation:

  • Program icons can be “pinned” to the super bar, so they’re always there, so you don’t need the Quick Launch bar anymore.
  • The same icon is used for both running and pinned applications.
  • Right-clicking a running program icon now has a new “jump list” menu.

Here’s why this is actually worse than the previous task bar:

  • A “pinned” icon is almost visually indistinguishable from a running icon, varying in appearance by only an ever so slight change in the border of the icon.  In the old task bar with Quick Launch icons as small 16×16 icons in a separate area, and running program icons as larger (wider) icons on a separate area, there was no question as to which was which.  There have been many complaints about this.
  • With the old quick launch and taskbar, to start multiple instances of the same program, you click that icon in the quick launch as many times as you need instances.  In the new Windows 7 task bar, clicking a program icon the first time starts it, clicking it the second time minimizes it, then restores, then minimizes, etc…  How do you get another instance running?  (There’s actually a way, but it’s not intuitive, like the old Quick Launch bar was) and it only works with a 3 button mouse.  To launch multiple instances, click the center mouse button (usually the “wheel” button).  If you didn’t know that, it’d be difficult, if not impossible to figure out, much less, to even know that it’s still an option.
  • To minimize, restore, or maximize a program window, in the old task bar, you could right click the running program icon and choose “minimize”, “restore”, or “maximize”.  Now with the new Windows 7 jump menus, those options are now gone.

Gee, THANKS Microsoft!

Here are some related articles:

  • Windows 7 Explorer: Getting the tree view back
  • Get your Quick Launch bar back under Windows 7
  • Windows 7 Classic Start Menu
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    How to handle ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder in JavaScript

    If you develop in ASP.NET, you’ll notice when you run your web app, that your server side components get a name similar to “ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder” prepended to the name you assigned them.  To further frustrate things, that prefix is not guaranteed to be that from build to build.  So, how do you reference such an object from JavaScript?

    Assume you have an image object on your page.  At design time, the HTML for the image might look like this:

    <

    asp:Image ID="LogoImage" runat="server" ImageUrl="~/Images/logo.png" />

    Here’s a “compiled” and running HTML version of what an object might look like in the runtime HTML:

    <img id="ctl100_ContentPlaceHolder1_LogoImage" src="/Images/logo.png" style="border-width:0px"/>

    The problem is you don’t want to reference the object in JavaScript like this:

    document.getElementById("ctl100_ContentPlaceHolder1_LogoImage")

    Instead, do this:

    document.getElementById("<%=LogoImage.ClientID%>")

    Now your JavaScript is guaranteed to work even if the prefix changes with later compiles or updates to Visual Studio.