It didn't always.
The original taskbar didn't look at all like what you see today. It defaulted to the top of the screen and looked something like this.
This is definitely not what it actually looked like. It has been so long I forgot precisely what it looked like (I didn't realize there was going to be a quiz ten years later), but this captures the basic flavor, at least for the purpose of this discussion.
The point is that the bar took the form, not of buttons, but of tabs. Each tab corresponded to a running window, which melded into the tab. You switched window by clicking the corresponding tab.
You can see vestiges of this style in the TCS_BUTTONS
style in the tab control. When we switched to the button-look for
the taskbar, we still had a lot of switching code based on the tabs
metaphor, and it was less work to add a button-look to the tab control
than it was to rewrite all the switching code.
The tabbed look was abandoned for various reasons, one of which was
what everybody else has already noticed:
If you put the taskbar at the top of the screen, lots of windows
end up sliding under it, because they assumed that the usable area
of the screen began at (0,0).
Other windows would "creep" up the screen because they used
GetWindowPlacement to save their window position
(which returns workspace coordinates, where (0,0) is the first
usable pixel)
but use SetWindowPos to restore it (which uses
screen coordinates, where (0,0) is the upper left pixel of the
primary monitor).
There were too many apps that kept sliding under the top-docked taskbar so we had to abandon that idea and move it to the bottom.
It's somewhat disheartening to observe that now, eight years later, apps still mess up their coordinate systems and keep sliding under a top-docked or left-docked taskbar.
heh,
I have for a long time docked my taskbar to the top.
A co-worker noticed this and had a bit of a fit: I pointed out that it was entirely logical; at least then the Start menu drops DOWN like all other menus, instead of UP!
Our boss resolved the issue by proclaiming, "Never trust anybody who docks their taskbar at the top."
Now I dock it on the left, it’s far more efficient in screen real-estate when lots of apps are open.
Can you say IL DASM?
I recently switched to docking my taskbar at the top. There are sooo many apps that misbehave (ehem, even Microsoft apps). I’ve gotten really good at Alt-spacebar, down arrow, down arrow…
Does XP force apps to behave better with a top-docked taskbar? I was worried one of the apps I wrote would fall into the trap, but it behaves fine under XP; I haven’t tested it under anything else yet.
Ah, good for me, I AM using SetWindowPlacement :)
If bad apps drew themselves at (0,0), then why not move the coordinate system? Have (0,0) began the the lower left corner of the taskbar. So logical coordinate (0,0) would be drawn at physical pixel (0,20) or whatever. Since no app should draw using negative "off screen" coordinates, they would not be allowed to draw over the taskbar.
But Fitt’s Law tells us that having the taskbar at the top would still be a bad idea because the app menu bars would not be at the edge of the screen (where they can easily be clicked). Of course, I just glanced at the top of my Windows XP desktop and see that the File menu is still not at the top of the screen because of the enormous window title bar. :-(
Changing the coordinate system would have broken soooo many apps: Any app that wanted to cover the entire screen (screensavers, games, PowerPoint) would end up leaving the taskbar exposed.
I’ve docked my taskbar at the top for years, and I don’t know if it has anything to do with Windows XP but very few apps slide under it anymore. Aside from some example code from the ‘net, the only app I can remember doing it in the past year or two was Mame.
what a load of hogwash, the reason it’s on the bottom is so MS can point to one more thing that makes Windows different from the MacOS. and it worked, it helped them in their court cases.
don’t try to re-write history Raymond. i can’t believe no else has made this comment yet.
I find it quite amusing that "it was less work to add a button-look to the tab control than it was to rewrite all the switching code".
This is virtually the very definition of "hacking" over doing development properly – instead of changing your code to use the correct API (buttons), you hack into the API (tab control) and force it into an entirely alien "button" concept.
Yes yes I know that sometimes you do hacks to get quick results, but this is the company with (even then) almost unlimited resources to do things right, and who obviously never minded letting things slip.
Cheers
there is a piece of shareware called shove-it that will solve this problem
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GetWindowPlacement.