Never combine taskbar buttons on Windows 11 is probably one of the most coveted features that Windows 11 fans, enthusiasts, and users wished they had. The feature is one of the top searches on Google indicating people are definitely looking for ways to do it. People have been getting around using third-party apps like StartAllBack, ExplorerPatcher, among others, for restoring some of the classic Start menu items.
Close to the end of last year in November, we got the first hints of that in a Server preview build in the form of a forcibly disabled feature. Much more recently though, just two months ago, more glaring evidence has been uncovered in the first Canary build that Microsoft put out, 25314. There were a bunch of new strings related to Taskbar and some of those suggested that the ability to ungroup apps and show labels was in Microsoft's mind.
Windows enthusiast and Twitter user Albacore has developed a new utility which brings some of these abilities to life. The app is called Shell Frosting and its maiden release was published earlier today. The tool allows users to play around with a few options which include:
- Always combine, hide labels
- Combine when taskbar is full
- Never combine
The UI is pretty simple to interact with as you can see in the images below on Dev build 23451. There is an option for multiple displays as well:
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As mentioned above, this is the first release of the Shell Frosting utility and the dev has cautioned that it is quite unstable. However, if you want to try it out on a VM or something, you can head over to GitHub and download it. It works on the Dev channel only at the moment.
Source: Albacore (Twitter)
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