Developers unearth the bones of an overhauled task manager for Windows 11

Microsoft’s piecemeal approach to updating and unifying the new look of Windows 11 has led to updates for all sorts of old and obscure corners of the operating system, including everything from the volume indicator and from system icons to humble Paint, Calculator and Notepad apps. The next app to get its once-in-a-decade or two design makeover could be Windows Task Manager, and it would be the first major update since Windows 8 was released a decade ago.

The edge reports this engineering student Gustave Monce spotted the Task Manager redesign lurking in a current preview build of Windows 11 (FireCube Studios’ Twitter account instructions posted later to activate it yourself). The basic structure of the application is visible in these versions. Like all Windows 11-era apps, the window uses mica theme and supports dark mode, and it swaps the current task manager’s horizontal row of tabs for a vertical stack of navigation buttons that mirrors settings and Windows Security apps. These text labels will also collapse into a vertical stack of buttons if the window is resized.

According to screenshots posted by users using the new task manager, it does not appear that the redesigned application includes significant functional improvements; the vertical buttons all correspond to the current task manager tabs, and the process and resource usage monitoring views all look much the same as they do today. But the new design is clearly a work in progress, and Microsoft may have more changes planned before officially showing the redesigned app to Windows Insiders.

Task Manager hasn’t remained entirely untouched since the days of Windows 8 – the tool gained the ability to monitor GPU usage in 2017 for GPUs with sufficiently updated drivers, for example. This vertically oriented redesign would be Task Manager’s first visual overhaul since 2012, but the pre-Windows 8 design was even more enduring. Its basic design has remained the same since the introduction of Task Manager in Windows NT 4.0 in 1996 until Windows 7 in 2009.

Listing Image By FireCubeStudios