{"id":438920,"date":"2026-01-30T13:41:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T13:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/438920\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T13:41:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T13:41:07","slug":"microsoft-is-experimenting-with-a-top-menu-bar-for-windows-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/438920\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft is experimenting with a top menu bar for Windows 11"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Microsoft\u2019s PowerToys team is contemplating building a top menu bar for Windows 11, much like Linux, macOS, or older versions of Windows. The menu bar, or <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/microsoft\/PowerToys\/issues\/45201\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Command Palette Dock<\/a> as Microsoft calls it, would be a new optional UI that provides quick access to tools, monitoring of system resources, and much more.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Microsoft has provided concept images of what it\u2019s looking to build, and is soliciting feedback on whether Windows users would use a PowerToy like this. \u201cThe dock is designed to be highly configurable,\u201d explains Niels Laute, a senior product manager at Microsoft. \u201cIt can be positioned on the top, left, right, or bottom edge of the screen, and extensions can be pinned to three distinct regions of the dock: start, center, and end.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">If Microsoft does go ahead and build this dock, it will also include customization options to change the background, styling, and overall theme. You\u2019ll also be able to easily reorder extensions between the different dock regions and pin them freely.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">This dock is designed to complement Microsoft\u2019s existing work with its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/news\/668719\/microsoft-command-palette-powertoy-launcher\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Command Palette launcher<\/a> that the company launched last year. Command Palette is similar to Apple\u2019s Spotlight in macOS, allowing you to quickly access commands, apps, and development tools.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Microsoft is currently soliciting feedback on this proposal, and developers can experiment with an early version of it by importing a project from Microsoft\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/microsoft\/PowerToys\/issues\/45201\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">PowerToys GitHub repository<\/a> into Visual Studio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft\u2019s PowerToys team is contemplating building a top menu bar for Windows 11, much like Linux, macOS, or&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1281,3,172,74,12655],"class_list":["post-438920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-microsoft","tag-news","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}