Microsoft’s incremental approach to updating and unifying the new look and feel of Windows 11 has resulted in updates to all sorts of old and obscure corners of the operating system, including everything from the volume gauge and system icons to the humble Paint, Calculator and Notepad apps. The next app to be updated every decade or two could be the Windows Task Manager, and it will be the first major update since Windows 8 came out ten years ago.
The Verge reports that engineering student Gustave Mons noticed a new task manager design lurking in the current pre-release build of Windows 11 (a FireCube Studios Twitter account later posted instructions to enable it yourself). These builds show the basic structure of the app – as with all apps from the Windows 11 era, the window is themed with Mica and supports dark mode, and the horizontal row of tabs of the current Task Manager is replaced with a vertical set of navigation buttons that reflect the modern Settings and Security apps. windows “. These text labels will also collapse into a vertical stack of buttons if the window is resized.
According to screenshots posted by users running the new Task Manager, it doesn’t look like the redesigned app includes major functional improvements; all vertical buttons correspond to tabs in the current task manager, and the views for monitoring processes and resource usage look much the same as they do now. But the new design is clearly a work in progress, and Microsoft may have more changes planned before it officially releases the updated app to Windows Insiders.
Task Manager hasn’t been completely untouched since Windows 8 – for example, the tool gained the ability to track GPU usage back in 2017 for GPUs with sufficiently updated drivers. This vertically oriented redesign will be the first visual change to Task Manager since 2012, but the pre-Windows 8 design lasted even longer. Its basic design has remained unchanged from the introduction of Task Manager in Windows NT 4.0 in 1996 until Windows 7 in 2009.