No, I want it THERE

March 8, 2018 5:46 PM

I like to have my frequently-used programs in the system tray bar at the bottom of my Windows 10 desktop. This means it is a single click to open a new instance of Chrome or Notepad or whatever. Except sometimes the open window gets bumped to the end. More detail within.

So my icons go in this order: Outlook, [work doc management system], Chrome, Word, Excel, Calculator, File Explorer, Sticky Notes, Notepad, [RFID software] and a few others. When I open Outlook, Word, Excel, the calculator, File Explorer, Sticky Notes, Notepad and the RFID software, the icon is replaced by a small tab in the same position.

But when I open the doc management system and Chrome, the tab does not replace the icon and frequently gets bumped to the end of the line - all the way over to the right, where I don't notice it and sometimes wind up opening a new instance, not realising I already have one active. I can manually drag the tab back over to be next to the icon - which is still there - but this is annoying.

I would have thought it was a MS software vs non-MS software glitch if it weren't for the RFID software behaving the way it's meant to.

Any ideas on how I can get this to stop? It is a small thing, but wow does it irritate me. I have tried googling but only seem to be able to find things about how to add icons to the system tray, which I obviously know how to do.

posted by Athanassiel to Technology (5 answers total)

This happens because each Chrome window is a separate instance of the application. You may find the utility 7+ Taskbar Tweaker to address this; check the option "When not grouping, place new items next to the existing ones."
posted by kindall at 5:54 PM on March 8, 2018

Response by poster: Sorry, not to threadsit but this is my work computer, and IT do not let us install programs unless they are from the Windows App store. It's sounding like I may need to just put up with it for these 2 programs.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:56 PM on March 8, 2018

Best answer: Have you tried running the offending program, unpinning the old, not-running button, then re-pinning the running one? Sometimes the taskbar gets confused about which program it should be keeping track of and this can sometimes help bring it back in line.

Also, double check that your taskbar setting for "Combine taskbar buttons" is set to "Always, hide labels". You can get to the taskbar settings by right-clicking an empty area of the taskbar, and choosing "Taskbar settings".
posted by Aleyn at 10:57 PM on March 8, 2018

Agree that Aleyn's suggestion might help you. Applications can explicitly control how this works but Microsoft also does some heuristics to handle the majority of the cases where the app didn't declare this outright. And as Aleyn says, Windows can get confused.
posted by mmascolino at 6:46 AM on March 9, 2018

Response by poster: Thank you so much! We had a long weekend so I didn't get a chance to try it out till just now, but yes, unpinning the program, opening it and then pinning the running window seems to have done the trick - I think previously I had dragged a shortcut down to the taskbar. This worked for both Chrome and the doc management system, no extra plug-ins required! I knew it would be something simple, I just couldn't work out what it was.
posted by Athanassiel at 2:32 PM on March 12, 2018 [1 favorite]