Submission details
Restore ability to dock the desktop as a auto-hide toolbar at the edge of the screen.
My concept of the ideal desktop is a completely blank screen, with an auto-hidden start/task bar at the bottom of the screen and an auto-hidden Desktop toolbar at the top of the screen.
In XP, it was easy to detach the Desktop toolbar and dock it at the edge of the screen, and then uncheck Show Desktop Icons. In Vista, it got harder as it was no longer possible to detach the Desktop toolbar. However, it was possible to create a shortcut on the Desktop, link it to the Desktop folder, and then dock the shortcut to the screen edge.
In Windows 7, neither of these mechanisms seems to work as it is no longer to dock a folder to the screen edge. I can see no reason why this functionality has been taken away.
Before responding, please don't just say "it is time to move on". That is to fall for 2 huge fallacies - "This is old and therefore bad", and "This is new and therefore better".
I have seen very few user interfaces changes that can really be justified as being anything other than gratuitous tinkering. Some changes can be more productive for some people, but to impose them by removing older interface functionality just smacks of arrogance. OK if it is no longer possible to implement the older functionality, but this is almost never the case.
Restore the ability to dock a folder to the screen edge. (Actually, it would be preferable to restore the ability to detach the Desktop tool bar and dock that.)
High
High
Not fixed
Petko wrote on April 27, 2010, 1:02am
I read somwhere that Microsoft had some negative user requests regarding this feature and that's why they REMOVED it! It would be so simple if they just played with the default value of "Prevent adding, dragging, dropping and closing the Taskbar's toolbars" group policy setting, and leave all of us who know what we whant the ability to re-enabele the feature. I can't imagine that its implementation (even more already existing for XP and Vista) is a big deal for 10GB operating system, so there is nothing reasonable in removing completely the feature.