Users consider those who put the taskbar on the left side of Windows to be crazy

Where to put the Start button is a question that can split any Windows community faster than a browser tab argument.

Some people jump straight into settings after a fresh install and shove the menu back into the bottom left corner, where it lived for decades. Others leave everything centered and go about their day like nothing happened.

Windows 11 moved the Start menu and taskbar to the center of the screen, borrowing pretty openly from macOS and its dock. For anyone running a standard monitor, that's a questionable call, but on ultrawide displays the centered layout actually starts to make sense. The cursor just has less distance to travel to reach the icons instead of getting dragged all the way to a far corner.

A separate group sets the taskbar to auto-hide, and not for looks – there are practical reasons behind it. OLED monitor owners hide the taskbar to avoid pixel burn-in from a static UI element sitting in the same spot all day.

The same logic applies to multi-monitor setups running different resolutions, where a fixed taskbar starts looking off.

The real old-school elite kept their taskbar on the side or up top. These days people call them the weird ones, but there's solid math backing the choice. On a wide monitor, a bottom taskbar eats up a strip measuring 5120 by 40 pixels, while that same taskbar on the right side only takes up 74 by 1440. That's nearly double the space saved by going vertical, and it makes sense given modern screens have plenty of horizontal room to spare while vertical space stays tight.

The catch is that Windows 11 took away the option to move the taskbar anywhere else, locking it permanently to the bottom edge. The reasoning is pretty mundane – too many programs hard-coded the assumption that the taskbar always sits at the bottom, and they'd break the moment that wasn't true. Microsoft got tired of fighting that battle and solved it the blunt way, by just removing the option entirely.

Third-party tools like ExplorerPatcher became the workaround for anyone who refused to accept this, bringing back the old Windows 10 behavior. Rumor has it native support for repositioning the taskbar is coming back officially soon.

The taskbar has been bouncing between screen edges since Windows 95, and the debate over its one true home shows no signs of dying down.