Windows 7: Taskbar Button Grouping - Enable or Disable

Nice tutorial.

However, I have a complaint. MS seems to think it's great to introduce basic functionality and leave it up to the dev community to actually make the functionality useful. They didn't actually think people would NOT want to combine similar buttons...like multiple browser windows? Typical microsoft.

Hello Siwftouch, and welcome to Seven Forums.

This may help with that instead.

How to Enable or Disable Internet Explorer 8 Individual Tabbed Browsing Taskbar Preview Windows

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Hi there was a registry hack for XP called TaskbarGroupSize to change up the number of taskbar slots before the OS decided it was 'full' and started grouping.

Is this something we can still use in win 7? I use a large screen so grouping early can be tedious. I had XP set on 20 something. Ive googled some and i cant seem to find anyone thats tried it (just lots of turn it on or off articles and minwidth doesnt really do the same thing.

Thanks a lot

Hello Mad Ad, and welcome to Seven Forums.

In Windows 7, you only turn taskbar icon grouping on or off instead. However you can change the Taskbar thumbnail previews and list Mode Threshold limit if you like though.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately due to instability running multiple instances of a favourite 3d windowed app I can not run aero themes (no complaints there, im not big on unnecessary fancyness).

Lets see if i can break this down a little. I am in 'combine when full' mode in Windows 7 and in XP there was a registry key that could be added to increase the number of slots on the taskbar.

Its an additive key so theres nothing there to begin but in XP somewhere there must be the default value somewhere. By adding a TaskbarGroupSize key and value it overrides that default and the number of open windows would then change the limit of what was 'full' and forced it to start combining. I increased mine to get more along the bottom, others reduced theirs to 1, effectively mimicking the newer combine methods (single tile lists).

I'm an avocate of minimising clicks wherever possible, over zealous combining or things like list modes add more work to my day by doubling the amount of clicks I have to make to fish something out of my hectic desktop rather than have an instantly clickable tile. These interferences and attempts to 'clean up' is an intrusion for the most part, change for the sake of change it seems, some may like it but its not efficient workflow for me.

So-after more reading the only thing I hear is its now not supported in Windows 7, but does that mean supported, or exists? Or is there a new key to control whats 'full' with a different name? Right now I can get 14 browser windows open before it combines, that 14 must be in there somewhere as a default, or if not, what is the default?


Thanks a lot.

Mad Ad,

I'm not sure if it's possible, but I'll look into it and post back if I find anything on it for you.

no news is bad news huh?

Hello Mad Ad,

Yeah, I'm afraid that I still have not found anything for this yet in Windows 7.

hi, i wondering if there the posibility to group some program and other dont, for example

but this was for "combine when the taskbar is full".

Hello Shaolin,

Sorry, but it's either that taskbar button grouping is enable or disabled for all.