taskbar popups hover/thumbnails/list customization

I know this has been discussed in the past (tweak programs, regedits, gpedit.msc, control panel settings, etc.) but a lot of the info may be dated and some was version and build specific.

As of Feb 2016, what are people doing?

I have Windows 7 Professional (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601)

When you open a window, it creates an icon/link on the taskbar--whether a browser window, folder, or program such as a Word document. These are spread out and take up a lot of room. I'd like to have the links appear as a list rather than thumbnails. I'd also like to have only 1 icon/link button for Word, 1 for each Firefox open window, 1 for Explorer, etc., rather than a spread out button for each document/instance/whatever. So when you hover over the Word icon, a list of open word documents would appear, and when you hover over firefox, a list of the open windows would appear, etc..

On my Windows 8 laptop the icons/links are stacked, rather than spread out; this is better. Is there a way to do that on the Windows 7? Then have the stack of links/icon popup as a list rather than thumbnails?

Thanks