Every user of any version of Windows, including Windows 11, who uses any type of application in their daily life (I hope you understand that I mean just about everyone) has at some point encountered a very unpleasant situation an application that has stopped responding and of course cannot be closed even in a conventional way. This can be downright annoying if you don’t lose anything, or scary if it happens in an app where you’re making any edits and haven’t saved your changes in a while.

Currently, the most common way to close such applications (usually after waiting a few minutes to see if they come back to life, especially if forcefully closing them leads to a loss of work) is to open Task Manager, search for the rogue application in it and close it after selecting it. However, for those who love the command line, Windows Powershell allows you to use the ps + kill pairing. These aren’t particularly complicated methods, but they do require a few steps and a reasonably stable system.

As we already told you, Microsoft Build 2023 is being celebrated these days with announcements as interesting as Windows 11 Moments 3, future native support for RAR, TAR, GZ and other file formats, collaboration with Intel to use computing with artificial intelligence . to PC or the tight integration of Windows Copilot in Windows 11, to name just a few of the most important.

Thus, among so many high-profile news, there was also an announcement that went somewhat unnoticed, but which we can read about in The Verge, namely Windows 11 will allow you to force close applications directly from the context menu of its icon on the taskbar. As you can see in the image above this paragraph, we just need to right-click on the program we want to close and from there we can do the same type of closing for which we had to go to the task manager until now.

This may seem like a small detail, but it is not, because on many occasions an unstable application can cause the whole system to become unstable (despite the fact that there are supposedly dedicated operating system features to prevent this). Under these circumstances, even opening Task Manager or the console can be a much more difficult task than it should be. So, due to the impossibility of forcing a shutdown from any of them, we may be left with a PC reboot, which can lead to more losses.

Displaying a context menu uses much less system resources than opening a window, be it the Task Manager or the console, so this new feature can make a significant difference when we encounter an unresponsive application that can threaten the stability of the entire system. If this scenario was taken into account when implementing it in Windows 11, and then a system was created favoring this feature, we will be talking about a huge improvement not only in usability and user experience, but also in system reliability.