Microsoft has recently dealt several blows to Task Manager. As PC Gamer’s Andy Edser noted last week, the Windows team recently eliminated a bug that kept the Task Manager immortal. Unfortunately, the now mortal Task Manager has also been suffering for months from an indignity that I’ve only just now noticed: a hopeless icon tailored to Windows 11.
Overall, I’m ambivalent about the aesthetics of Windows 11. The icons and menus are mostly uninspired, but useful, and blend into the 1920s corporate visual design in a way that befits an operating system that has iterated to a state of near-identitylessness (AI will of course solve this problem!).
As a die-hard Google Docs fan, I ultimately don’t care about Microsoft Office, but I do care about Task Manager. Beautiful, attractive Task Manager, perhaps the only purely functional element of Windows, and for the most part it keeps getting better. This sensible app has long had a sensible icon: in Windows 10 and early Windows 11, Microsoft represented it with a airy blue line graph on a blank background.
The spikes were effortless to see and effortless to interpret as CPU performance.
Apparently in the last year – I really must be behind on Windows updates – this icon has changed. And the recent icon, although similar in concept, totally sucks. Two additional layers of lighter and darker blue turn it into an abstract topographic map.
In its most miniature form on my 1440p desktop, my brain can only interpret the recent Task Manager icon as a blurry pair of waves. Or maybe a suspension bridge? I dunno, it looks like a kid cut some shapes out of construction paper and glued them together for a school assignment called “What the Ocean Looks Like.”
Here’s the thing that really pisses me off: it doesn’t even make sense as a Task Manager chart anymore! If you open the Performance tab in Task Manager, you can see a line graph of CPU, GPU, or whatever usage, but each is a separate graph because overlaying them would be pointless visual chaos. Different things cause these charts to rise at different times and to different degrees. So even if you put them on – an option that Task Manager doesn’t offer! – it will not look like a recent icon that shows two layers in the same pattern.
The previous icon was nothing special, but it was harmless. The more I look at this recent one, the more it annoys me, just like the Powerpoint icon that is now an icon orange paintball screams at me “we’ve lost the plot”.
But there is a Task Manager icon that I will fight for, and I find it not only harmless, but also great: an original from the days of Windows 2000 and XP.
Look at these attractive, proficient pixels. It’s like a heart rate monitor, but for your computer! It’s definitely a nice little computer with a graph right next to it.
Windows used to be fun to look at. Still, now he desperately wants you to talk to him everything he has to say just shows how incompetent he is.
