In computing, the taskbar is a term for the application desktop bar which is used to launch and monitor applications in Microsoft Windows 95 and later versions. Other desktop environments also feature similar interface elements.
In Windows, the default location for the taskbar is at the bottom of the screen, and from left to right it contains by default the Start menu, Quick Launch bar, taskbar buttons and notification area (commonly, and incorrectly, referred to as the system tray). With the release of Windows XP, Microsoft changed the behavior of the taskbar to take advantage of Fitts' law.[1]
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Other toolbars may be added to the taskbar, and it can also be hidden, placed on top of other applications, or moved to the side or the top of the screen.
Windows is not the only operating system with a taskbar: similar bars are present in various Linux desktop environments. The Dock, as featured in Mac OS X and its predecessor NEXTSTEP, is also a kind of taskbar. The Mac OS X Dock is application-oriented instead of window-oriented. Each running application is represented by one icon in the Dock regardless of how many windows it has on screen. A textual menu can be opened by right-clicking on the dock icon that gives access to an application's windows, among other functions determined by the app. Minimized windows also appear in the dock, in the rightmost section, represented by a graphical thumbnail.
The first known implementation of the taskbar concept is seen in Acorn's Arthur operating system, which was released in 1987 for their Archimedes computer. It is called the Iconbar and remains an essential part of Arthur's succeeding RISC OS operating system. The Iconbar holds icons which represent mounted disc drives and RAM discs, running applications and system utilities. These icons have their own context-sensitive menus and support drag and drop behaviour. It should be noted that Windows 1.00, released in 1985 (two years earlier than Arthur), also sported a variant of the taskbar. Running tasks were iconified in the bottom panel. There was no notification area, though.[2][3]. Windows 2.x and 3.x had no taskbar, but showed minimized running tasks on the Desktop.
In various KDE distributions, the taskbar is run by the Kicker program, and consists of two parts: the panel and the taskbar. The panel is a control bar across the bottom of the screen, which is used to find and launch applications and navigate among windows and desktops. It contains the menu, which is comparable to the Windows start menu; the disk navigator, which allows access to the file system by menus (a similar thing can be done in Windows); and the desktop pager, which changes between desktops. The last item is not possible in Windows by default. As with the Windows 'Quick Launch bar', additional buttons can be added to the KDE panel, to quickly open applications, directories, and URLs.
The second part is the taskbar runs across the top of the screen and helps keep track of running applications. This is similar to the 'Taskbar buttons' area of the Windows taskbar.
Similarly, the GNOME desktop environment uses its own type of taskbar, known as panels (the program responsible for them is therefore called gnome-panel). By default, GNOME usually contains two full-width panels at the top and bottom of the screen. The top panel usually contains navigation menus labelled Applications, Places, and System in that order. These menus hold links to common applications, areas of the file system, and system preferences and administration utilities, respectively. The top panel usually contains a clock and notification area, which can double as a sort of dock, as well.
| [Image:Top-panel.jpg|700px|thumb|A custom [[GNOME]] Top Panel with shortcuts made for dsl connection]] |
The bottom panel is commonly empty by default, other than a set of buttons to navigate between desktops and a button to minimize all windows and show the desktop, due to its use in the navigation between windows (windows minimize to the bottom panel by default).
These panels can be populated with other completely customizable menus and buttons, including new menus, search boxes, and icons to perform quick-launch like functions. Other applications can also be attached to the panels, and the panels are highly reconfigurable: anything on these panels can be moved, removed, or configured in other ways. For example, a dedicated Windows user migrating to GNU/Linux might move the menus usually posed in the top panel into a 'start' menu on the bottom panel as well as moving the notification area into the place normally posed by the Windows notification area, then remove the top panel altogether, in order to emulate Windows.