The unseen evolution of the Windows 7 Taskbar
It’s hard to picture the Windows Taskbar’s evolutionary past at Microsoft, because… well it was developed in the dark. A couple of months ago, I sat down with Chris Holmes and dug up builds from each development milestone at Microsoft and activated the new, secret Taskbar for comparison.
Figure of Milestone 1, 2, and Beta (Milestone 3-like) Taskbars displayed vertically, respectively.
The Milestone 1 Taskbar was switched on with the addition of a Boolean DWORD value named EnableCHS, placed in the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced key. One could infer CHS is a symbolic reference to the Chinese and their government’s way of shrouding everything in secrecy. Microsoft has come out and said CHS stood for Can Has Superbar, a reference to “lolspeak”. This iteration of the Taskbar featured very basic grouping features, live preview, and early support for “pinning” although not completely functional.
Milestone 2 builds featured an improved Taskbar, primarily focused on improving past pinning and grouping work. It also featured the beginnings of what we now know as Jumplists and Aero Peek. Unlike the previous Taskbar, the Shell performed more vigorous checks on who you were, under the Microsoft corporate umbrella, to determine if you were authorized to use the new Taskbar. One could infer these additions denote the point in time in which “new Taskbar builds” of Windows 7 had to be shared outside the Shell group for further work (e.g. the teams that work on Libraries, Find and Organize).
At the end of what you could call the “private development” tunnel, Microsoft started work on Milestone 3 builds of Taskbar. It is at this time, pinning and grouping features were smoothed out, attention jerking elements were removed (e.g. the awful white gradient), and the more subtle icon resources installed in preparation for the upcoming technical preview. Unpictured, Jumplists still had the small arrow that appeared upon hover over a Taskbar button.
The Milestone 3 Taskbar received little polish before being pushed out to the public in the first Pre-beta build of Windows 7. While demoed at the Professional Developers Conference in 2008, the Taskbar was not intended for public use. Having received a tip of the new Taskbar’s existence, however, I circumvented its Milestone 2-based protection and developed a tool to enable its public critique. (After all, we, the users, were the ones that were going to be using this from now until the next major Taskbar change. I felt it was important to perfect it now before code freeze.)
Updated July 30, 2009: Added proper definition of CHS, as per Microsoft.
Wow i really like Milestone 2 with the number representing the number of launched copies of the apps are open… at least this means if you have more than three copies of the program open you know exactly how many there are running and they shadow boxes dont get lost in the disolve.
Yeah, I really like the number thinger on the taskbar too. It would have been nice if they kept that in with the final version.
In that small example, the Milestone 2 version looks interesting, but I can see the obvious problem with it when you have a taskbar full of applications. It would look cluttered and absolutely horrific.
To top it off, what importance is it to know how many windows you have open? The only possible reason could be resource management, which I don’t think is a good excuse to have taskbar clutter.
I like Milestone 2’s System Tray, but I wish that the Start Menu button had changed too. Like, if it was just the Windows logo overlaid on that part of the Taskbar with a separator like M2’s System Tray, that would look amazing.
i agree with Silhouette. They really should of dropped the orb and went with just the flag. In white! That would of been the icing on the cake.
I love m2!!
Very cool how it went from Vista to what it is now :o
no thanks microsoft.
I’ll stick with Vista from now on. Too many design changes in 7
I think you missed the one where they had arrows beside each icon for jumplists. It was one of the builds shortly after M3 and before beta if I remember correctly
looks shite.. all of those miltestones, oversized crap design.. and actually looks like it got and worse and worse… who are these nubz implementing shit within windows ?
Ok please I’m stupid, can someone tell me how to make a DWORD to enable the M1 taskbar?? I really really have been searching how to enable this for a long time, but I don’t know how to make this value!
This guy missed one. I found a website that shows one more version of the Superbar, that was better than any of the 3 above.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090425/microsoft-training-video-older-prototype-windows-7-superbar/
Here is a large gallery with Windows 7 Taskbar prototypes:
http://winbeta.pl/sample3/windows7prototypy.htm
Enjoy
Thanks a lot for this tip. But “awful white gradient”?! It’s much, much, much better than the final flat and plain… bench!
@the pl4gue: This is not a real builds afaik, its just somekind of “Mockup” how it should be.
“awful white gradient” – no shit, it’s really awful. they should have replaced it and choose milestone 2 version.
@the pl4gue
It was never in build. Just a hi-fi prototype.
Everything you see in that photo was in-build. Not prototypes or mockups.
What about this:
http://winbeta.pl/sample3/windows7prototypy/windows7prototyp_068.JPG
@ everyone posting links to winbeta… those are from the MIX09 demo video showing the development of Windows 7…
nothing new…
lol, they fucked up the start button.
Wow, the taskbar has different than from m1 to m2 and m3.
I like a m2 superbar because has numbering grouping.
Not like windows 7 beta to windows 7 rtm.
Do you know hack to show a number in never windows 7.
hey is it still possible to get any of the 2 that have the white gradient in the RC build or even RTM??? even a third party theme would work for me it just looks so mutch better!!
shitty noob taskbar
Ya know, the second one would look actually a lot better than the final one if it were completed, I mean they should fix the start button placement and background, and make it have a more subtle gradient. I agree that the “number thinger” is way better than the current one-two-lots counter.
Theme designers, anyone?
If anybody’s interested in some more background of the Win7 taskbar, check out:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/yochay/Designing-the-Windows-7-Taskbar/
I hope sometime we’ll find the opportunity to show even more prototypes, they were really fun to work on.
-Rob (Win7 taskbar dev)
can anyone tell me how to find this taskbar or to activate in on Windows 7 Milestone 2? i got the build but it has the vista taskbar :( please send me an e-mail at : windows.ro@gmail.com
Evolved or devolved? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_in_Windows_7#Taskbar