The main panel is one of the most important elements of the Windows 11 interfacejust like its predecessors, with the notable exception of the never-understood Windows 8. In it, we add direct access to the applications we use most often, we use them to see at a glance what programs we have open at all, and besides, let’s rather use Windows keyboard shortcuts, we use them all the time to switch from one application to another.

With a freshly installed Windows 11, only the predefined apps for it will be pinned, but over time we will most likely end up adding a few more. Something that, combined with working with many programs open at the same time, causes it to not fit all the icons that should be displayed in it. In these cases when the contents overflow, Windows 11 will show us the anchored ones, the last employee and the others that fit. The rest will not be accessible from the main panel.

However, that could soon change, as we can read in The Verge. And again, we’re talking about a small change, a solution so simple that it’s a wonder it wasn’t thought of before, but which brings a huge improvement to the user experience of the operating system. And Microsoft is testing on Windows 11 an icon that would appear on the taskbar and that would allow us to access these invisible applications due to bar overflow.

This new item was featured in the latest developer channel build of the Windows Insiders program, which tells us that it is not yet certain that it will eventually make the jump to a stable version of the operating system, and even if it does, that it may still be a long time. At the very least, we’d have to wait until next year’s first update, as Windows 11 22H2 is already locked in terms of adding new features, even though we still have to wait until the summer (or at least a large part of itself) to be released.

It is Windows 11 22H2 that will bring the long-awaited improvements to the taskbar, something that was already present in previous versions of Windows and which surprisingly disappeared in Windows 11. I mean of course the ability to drag files onto bar icons to open them in the selected applicationa feature that, at least in my case, I use so regularly that until it comes to me, it makes me not even think about jumping to Windows 11.