This is a very complex design and it’s very difficult to adapt to different form factors (just unlock the taskbar and make it taller, you might wanna cry), and let’s not event talk about tablet mode where the system tray just vanishes.

The system tray is a feature that survives to time because there are apps that still use it, but it’s just a messed up drawer that holds everything and nothing at the same time: you can’t rely on it to show you all background processes and it doesn’t really fit the OS, each app does what it wants. So this is my solution, let’s chop its head of! (but slowly).

One to save them all

The idea is to find something that can hold the capabilities of all the actions you can execute through the current taskbar, but we don’t have to be too imaginative as the solution is already in Windows: the Action Center.

But the one we know is not enough to hold everything together, so I’m introducing…

The Action Center Pins

Now every action previously made as a toolbar is included in Action Center. This way you can pin whatever you want to the taskbar like classic default system actions such as time, Windows Ink, the sound flyout… but also any toggle or action from the Action Center like the new progress panel (ups spoiler), a slider for the brightness, the Gamebar, the Connect panel…

This also works the other way around. Do you want to pin the clock in the Action Center? Well why not!

But this bad boy needs some new actions to hold everything I’ve just slayed. Presenting:

The progress panel

This baby hosts every process that manages files or any kind of background processes like OneDrive, Dropbox, Microsoft Edge downloads, print progress…

Image of the progress panel pinned to the taskbar

It provides a unified experience to check your processes and should be independent to the foreground app so if you close the main process the download won’t get interrupted unless you kill that particular process.