Windows 7: The New Taskbar

Windows 7: The New Taskbar

Author JoeDigital

By and large, Windows 7, understandably, looks a lot like Vista. Yes, it’s got a cool new front-end theme, but anyone can change the theme these days, so that’s not exactly a major change. But then you eye catches the taskbar, and that’s when differences become noticeable.

The quick launch bar is now one and the same with the taskbar, for starters, and that taskbar acts more like a launch bar, providing customized access to files and folders that are frequently used, as well as managing open applications.

Another nice feature is that if you have multiple instances of a program open, Firefox, for example, and one of them crashes, the crash is now managed so that it will not affect the other instance(s) running. This is very similar to the the way Google Chrome isolates tabs, treating each one as a separate instance, which creates more stability, and greatly enhances security.

We’ve already mentioned the changes that have been made to the notification area (commonly misrepresented as the system tray), but those changes merge well with other modification to the taskbar, and add a lot of usability to what has always been a rather stagnant portion of the desktop.

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