Small Taskbar icons

As I’m sure you are all aware, windows 11 at the moment does not allow for small taskbar icons, a feature possible in windows 10. I understand I can just hide away the taskbar when I’m not using it, or just use explorer patcher to have a windows 10 taskbar with small icons, but I want the stock windows 11 taskbar, just smaller.

If you're on the regular channel, just do Part B, here...

You could use Stardock Start11, but it's not free (however not expensive).
With that you can choose to have small icons but further the taskbar can be used like the stock Windows 11 taskbar.
Although you can, if wished so, use some other facilities like never combine (which is planned to be included in a new Windows 11 version anyway).

James said:

but I want the stock windows 11 taskbar, just smaller.

Click to expand...

You and a lot of other people. It's one of the most requested features on feedback hub. Currently as far as I know a 3rd party tool is the only option you have other than increasing/decreasing the DPI scaling level. However, that affects everything you see so the tradeoff might not be worth it.

It was quite a logical step to increase the height of the taskbar compared to Windows 10, because more information was displayed. For example, the new double-row widgets would be unreadably small on the lower tray on a 1920 x 1080 dpi laptop screen.
This size is easy to read for me.

glasskuter said:

You and a lot of other people. It's one of the most requested features on feedback hub. Currently as far as I know a 3rd party tool is the only option you have other than increasing/decreasing the DPI scaling level. However, that affects everything you see so the tradeoff might not be worth it.

Click to expand...

Yes, thought it would be a highly requested feature, thanks. Hmm.. I’m on 100% scaling - and in Nvidia control panel I think I can reduce it. I’m on 1920x1080 however, so artificially lowering the size of everything is not something I’m prepared to do (especially with a 24” display)

As I use dpi-scaling 125% (because my old eyes can't bear the minature icons of many apps), my taskbar would be rather big at normal height. I never use widgets and my taskbar is rather empty (if I have no windows open). So I use small icons, which makes the taskbar smaller.

My desktop (1920x1080 as well) looks like this (click the image for full size):



As you can see it's a rather boring desktop. I don't like to be distracted from what I really need to do...
And it's rather old-fashioned, have that view already since Windows XP.
I hate having to get used to new User Interfaces just because the manufacturer of the software tells me to.
That's why I still use programs without this miserable ribbon including the old notepad.
I like menus, have used them since the first version of Window 3.x .

All the stuff that formerly was in the quick launch now is in the lower left part of my start menu:



I did blend out some stuff I would not like to show and the language is Dutch, but many words are very close to the English equivalent.