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Windows 11's New 'Never Combine' Icons Feature Is Almost Unusable (bleepingcomputer.com) 121

Lawrence Abrams writes via BleepingComputer: After almost three years, Microsoft has finally added the 'Never combine taskbar button' back to Windows, and it still doesn't work correctly. The combine taskbar items feature in Windows 10 allows you to show an icon for every open application in Windows, even if they are multiple instances of the same application. For example, if you have ten instances of Notepad or a few browser windows open, the feature will allow you to see an icon on the taskbar for each open Windows rather than combining it into a single application icon.

For me and many others, removing this feature made it impossible to upgrade to Windows 11, as switching between the myriad open windows became a nightmare. This frustration is reflected in the Windows 11 Feedback Hub, where a suggestion to never combine app icons and show labels has received 17,527 upvotes, making it the 10th most requested feature. Today, those users who have been holding off on upgrading to Windows 11 because of this missing feature "may" finally be able to do so. This is because Microsoft finally released the "never combine" feature as part of its Windows 11 22H2 Moment 4 update released today.

However, even with this feature added, it is still subpar to Windows 10, as, unlike the previous version of Windows, it continues to show the windows titles next to the icon, taking up a lot of space. It's baffling that Microsoft can't get this feature right after three years with it being one of the most highly requested features. A simple toggle to disable the showing of Windows titles could have been added, or Microsoft could have replicated the Windows 10 feature many of us requested.

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Windows 11's New 'Never Combine' Icons Feature Is Almost Unusable

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  • by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:09PM (#63879807) Homepage

    They're getting everyone arguing about this so they can sneak something else distasteful past in the chaos.

    • by blackomegax ( 807080 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @09:45PM (#63879965) Journal
      Sneak? They have no need to sneak. If they want to publish malware, they just have to call it something like kb3075249 and included it in patch tuesday and nobody is the wiser. Closed source, can't inspect code.

      proof



      kb3075249 - "...adds telemetry points..." (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3075249)

      kb3080149 - "...Telemetry tracking service..." (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3080149)

      kb3068708 - "...Telemetry tracking service..." (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3068708)

      kb2976978 - "...performs diagnostics on the Windows systems that participate in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program..." (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2976978)

      kb3021917 - "...Telemetry is sent back to Microsoft..." (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3021917)
      • How is that not sneaking? They're not naming them "telemetry update" or whatever, and the primary description is always "fixes some bug" and you have to dig down before you see the telemetry stuff.

        • Because it's not hidden. The information is there, hosted for the public to see, as you did.
          • by dfm3 ( 830843 )
            Oh, okay, you're right. It was not hidden. It was in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'
            • You want them to put it on billboards?
              • by dfm3 ( 830843 )

                You want them to put it on billboards?

                Sure, that sounds perfect to me. I would appreciate Windows Update at least asking me before installing malware. Not the current practice of "helpfully" installing the "update" and then restarting my computer overnight without first notifying me.

  • Agreed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:14PM (#63879813)

    The shitshow which is having to hover over a single icon then guess which of the teeny weeny pop-ups you want is maddeningly absent. I believe Windows has had this feature (and it is a feature) for what, 30 years, and now all of a sudden it can't be done? What's next, not having a single location with easy to find options to change your system, something like a control panel where everything is separated out and you can see everything?

    With each iteration of Windows, Microsoft keeps hiding things and making it more and more difficult to do anything.

    • Re:Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Samantha Wright ( 1324923 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:20PM (#63879825) Homepage Journal

      Actually, the author of TFA is deranged: he wants individual icons but no labels on his taskbar. That's what the article is about. (Which is sort of amazing since he gives the example of having 10 Notepad windows open at once, which are indistinguishable when they're all just iconized...)

      The feature as implemented works as intended, which is to say it works the way anyone who's ever used Windows 95 or fvwm95 would expect.

      • Re:Agreed (Score:5, Informative)

        by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:56PM (#63879879)

        Not quite. What he's complaining about is that though the tiles are separated and the title shows, the title is next to the icon, not above it. Look at the two pictures in the article. In the first, the icons are separated and the title is at the top. In the "new and improved" version in Windows 11, the title sits to the right of the icon, thus making each icon bigger and using up more space on the taskbar.

        I know what he's talking about because I always have my windows separated, even with multiple from the same program. With the titles above the icon you can easily have a dozen windows open and still be able to see what they are because the title is visible. With this new iteration, you get fewer windows in the same space AND the title is not as easily discernible.

        Not sure why Microsoft is having such a difficult time with this considering they already have the code from the past ten operating systems. It should (almost) be as easy as copy and paste.

        • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

          by edwdig ( 47888 )

          The first picture is the default behavior since at least Windows 7 (maybe Vista, but I never used that). Duplicate icons collapsed and hovering over one gives you a preview of all the open windows. The Win11 behavior does look like a regression tho, as those previews are significantly smaller than the previews I get on Win10.

          I struggle to sympathize here as with the quantity of windows I tend to have open, the grouping is necessary to keep it manageable. Keeping them separated just doesn't scale if you open

          • by Luthair ( 847766 )
            The first screenshot I believe is the default Windows 11 behaviour since launch. The second photo is what was added - Samatha Wright is right, the article's author is a crackhead.
          • Re:Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:49AM (#63880891)

            I don't understand why people still use horizontal task bars when vertical ones work so much better. Especially on wide screens where there's so much more excess horizontal screen space than vertical.

            Windows support for vertical taskbars is a bit lackluster, but I still I tend to have dozens of windows open with ungrouped icons with no problems, and the screen width lost to enough space to display the first few words of the titles isn't even close to a problem.

            It'd be nice if Windows had an easier way to change the preview window size though - the defaults are way too small, and having to edit the registry to change it means most people never will.

            • I don't understand why people still use horizontal task bars when vertical ones work so much better.

              Because not everyone is exactly like you? What works best for you does not mean it will work best for everyone.

            • by edwdig ( 47888 )

              A vertical taskbar is horrible in a multi-monitor setup. Either you have to limit it to one monitor, which makes it really inconvenient when you're looking at the other monitor, or you end up with a second taskbar in the middle of your work area, which would really get in the way.

            • by Striek ( 1811980 )

              Because I use three screens. The bottom of my centre screen is where the taskbar is. This is much easier to bury a mouse pointer into than the left side of the left screen.

            • Personally, I don't know why more people don't auto-hide the taskbar. If it's not visible unless you need it, then having it horizontal doesn't really matter as much.

        • Re:Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Samantha Wright ( 1324923 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @10:54PM (#63880067) Homepage Journal

          The first image shows a preview pop-up—the existing behaviour that was introduced in Windows 7 and became mandatory in previous Windows 11 versions. The previews are good, but having to wait for the pop-up window to appear in order to select one window from a multi-window application is annoying. Everyone agrees on this.

          The author specifically states that he wants the labels completely gone (emphasis added):

          It's baffling that Microsoft can't get this feature right after three years with it being one of the most highly requested features.

          A simple toggle to disable the showing of Windows titles could have been added, or Microsoft could have replicated the Windows 10 feature many of us requested.

          What TFA wants isn't an option in my Windows 10 settings, either, despite what he claims; I think it might have existed in Windows 7 (and earlier 10 builds?), but it doesn't exist now. I'm guessing he's in a very small minority of people who ever used it this way.

          That said, if I recall my old registry black magic correctly, the maximum taskbar button width used to be based on the size of the caption bar for iconified windows; a remnant from early builds of Windows Chicago [toastytech.com] when programs still minimized to the desktop (something similar can still be occasionally encountered in MDI applications or when Explorer crashes). The setting should be somewhere in HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics, but I don't see anything that looks like a likely candidate; must've been removed at some point. Back in the days of NT 4, I distinctly remember using taskbar buttons that were extra-wide, just for the novelty.

          • Everyone agrees on this.

            No we don't.
            Sincerely: The "everyone" for whom you don't speak on behalf.

            I'm all for you having a setting to choose how you want your system to act, just don't pretend you speak for everyone. The delay is quite useful given it prevents unintended additional animations.

        • Move the taskbar to the left or right. Use small icons. You will pack more windows in the taskbar. Expand the task bar size to 20% of screen width and turn on auto hide.
        • Probably because the original source code is unreadable. So much Windows code was made intentionally so during the Ballmer years so they could claim to US regulators (with some validity) that they couldn't separate feature X from interface Y. This came after the whole Netscape ruling. Of course, outsourcing coding work didn't help at all. Ironically, now that they want to make certain changes, they had to scrap large volumes of code and start over, hence why so Much of the Windows 11 user interface is j

      • Re:Agreed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @11:05PM (#63880079) Homepage

        Yeah, the "ask" the author is making is for something that hasn't been in Windows for a dog's age, and for fuck's sake, why would you *ask* for the OS to put 10 indistinguishable icons in the task bar? It's like a prime example of why you don't let users *design* UX. I bet between those 17,527 upvotes, there are 17,527 people who think they're talking about the same thing but would all argue among themselves on the most banal of implementation details ("I want the labels!" "I was talking about it without labels!" "I want the icons numbered!" "I want them to stack this way, that way!" etc etc)

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Not sure about this specific feature, but most of the UI things aren't actually removed when microsoft downgrades windows again by releasing the next version. You could dig out pretty much every aspect of old 2000 style start menu and taskbar in XP, 7, and even 10 with tools like classicshell/openshell. Which would mostly modify registry to enable to old settings that weren't used any more but came included with the newer and shittier version of the OS.

      Rather surprising that this hasn't been restored with 3

  • is that I'm not allowed to display or hide the entire taskbar myself anymore. But the hover nonsense is probably #2
  • by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:48PM (#63879871)

    I am wondering when I can switch to win11, as waiting for ability to put the taskbar to the right side where it belongs.

    • This! Except for me it's the left side. Nonetheless, it's silly that we lost that feature.

    • My windows 11 taskbar is positioned as I had it in windows 10. Settings->Personalization->Taskbar, under Taskbar behaviors, Taskbar alignment : Left. Seems an odd wording since what that did was reposition the start button to the left, which means my taskbar is to the right of the start menu button. But that was what I wanted, so whatever they want to call it.

  • Every Other Version (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:57PM (#63879887)

    Is crap. Been that way for a long time. I just don't know how long before we get internet boot only from Microsoft.

    After years of using Linux on other machines around the house, I have settled in on Open-SUSE. Give it a try, it is pretty usable and avoids the Redhat/IBM tax and more stable than *untu's.

    That said Windows 10 is probably my last Microsoft OS unless I go back to using their server version for a desktop. Since they killed the Action Packs, that gets pricey.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Windows 10 support ends in January 2025. So either they release Windows 12 before then, and it has a decent taskbar and supports older hardware, so millions of users stick with 10 and millions of PCs go to landfill.

      • I know Windows SMEs that stubbornly cling to the Windows 7 UI with aftermarket software (shitty idea from a security standpoint). Nearly a decade into Windows 10 and they're still unwilling to change how they use the OS! Itâ(TM)s not that big of a change folks

        We do this because the new UI is objectively worse than the old one. Removing features is dumb. Making extremely common actions like selecting an open program from the task bar require 3x the number of steps is stupid. Making it impossible to find stuff in the Start menu is idiotic.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Searching is somewhat reasonable for programs I use every day. For the tool I installed 6 months ago and used once, having a list I can look through is much easier than having to remember the name.
            I generally remember I installed a tool to do X, I don't remember its name.

            Then there's the problem that Windows 11 only includes installed programs in the Start menu, so when I have an executable didn't come with an installer, so I have to copy it into the Program Files folder, I cannot add it to the Start menu m

      • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:19AM (#63880827)

        Windows users are a bunch of whiners. I know Windows SMEs that stubbornly cling to the Windows 7 UI with aftermarket software (shitty idea from a security standpoint). Nearly a decade into Windows 10 and they're still unwilling to change how they use the OS! Itâ(TM)s not that big of a change folks. Try life in the Apple ecosystem where Cupertino makes major UI changes and responds to criticism with radio silence that translates into: "There's the door, don't let it hit you in the on the way out."

        Computers are merely tools to get shit done. They are not ends on to themselves. They are not objects of worship. Change for changes sake without commensurate value being provided in return is just wasting the users time. Workflows should be judged on their merits not unfalsifiable slogans.

        Windows UX is being watered down and people who actually need to use their computers to get shit done are being shitted on and forced to go out of their way to make their systems usable again.

    • I'm curious why you would choose Open-SUSE over Mint-Debian? I haven't looked at Open-SUSE but have tried SUSE distros in the past.
      • Mainly fluff. I like an efficient OS without too much of that. I am going to put in my own choices in applications and it just works. To me, the Debian/Ubuntu community is a little too diverse and problematic for my taste. I will probably find something else down the road because things change and stuff gets better/worse.

      • by kalpol ( 714519 )
        Personally I like Mint a lot too, and Debian is a sound choice as usual. OpenSuSE is just really polished and extremely configurable, but with configs that work fine out of the box. RIght now I run Tumbleweed on our main laptop/desktop, Leap for a backend server, and I have Win8 and WinXP VMs i keep around solely for some ancient radio programming software that won't run on anything else.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I am on Debian with some customizations (my own Kernel, no systemd, FVWM). Works nicely and hardly ever gives me any trouble. Unless Win 12 works well again, I will keep exactly one Windows machine for gaming and one Windows laptop for teaching (beamer connection problems in Linux due to a lot of beamers having crap firmware).

    • >> internet boot only from Microsoft.
      Why do you want to reboot the complete internet ?

    • I've run it at home for years and I can't think of any complaints. Tumbleweed is stable enough for daily use, how they do that I don't know. Their testing automation must be amazing. I had to boot from a previous snapshot once in a couple of years. Otherwise, it just works fine. KDE has many complicated configuration options, but you don't have to use them. Most software you want is packaged in the ready repos, if not usually someone's packaged it via OBS and you can easily get it by searching. Gaming is a
    • Microsoft is off of the every-other-version thing. Instead, they've decided that everything after Windows 7 needs to be crap.

  • Am I the only one that relies on alt+tab instead of taskbar buttons? I rarely use the taskbar except to open things I've pinned to it. Once it's open I just use alt+tab.

    • But they broke Alt-Tab in Windows 10. Now it swaps between windows in some apps, but swaps between tabs in some browsers. Totally inconsistent and dysfunctional.

      • by edwdig ( 47888 )

        I'm on Win10 and use Alt-Tab all the time. It works the same way it's worked since I started using Windows with 3.11. The only thing that's changed is now I get a preview of the window on the Alt-Tab screen rather than just an icon, which is a huge improvement.

      • See I like that, in (gasp!) Edge, where I can switch between recent browser tabs. That's the only time I've seen alt tab go between tabs in a window. What other apps does it do it for?

      • by SirSlud ( 67381 )

        The fuck are you talking about? Alt-tab doesn't do anything but switch between apps. Switching between tabs in both Chrome and Edge (and Firefox and Brave and etc I'm pretty sure too) is Ctrl-tab.

        • When I have multiple Edge tabs, and I've recently used some of those tabs, then those recently used tabs are individually accessible among the alt+tab selections. It makes some decision about which of those tabs was recently enough accessed to warrant being included.

  • I still havent seen a good reason to switch to 11 and the more ms messes with it the less I want to.
    • I have an icon telling me I can have Win 11 Pro for free. From Microsoft. I still won't install it. Every time I have to fix a Win 11 box my blood pressure shoots up. It literally makes me ill. I can't believe how bad they have fucked it up.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Thanks for the confirmation. It is really staggering how MS seems to be completely unable to learn.

  • Does Windows 11 finally introduce the ability to click on an app icon and bring every window into the foreground, similar to OS X? If not then you are left with either one icon per windows or having to hover and hope you pick the right window. It’s not a good UI.

    • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

      Not exactly that though similar enough, but at least our "X" buttons still actually close the program instead of Mac's stupid bullshit.

      • Similar enough? What does it do when you click an icon for an app with multiple windows open?

        • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

          A little preview with title of every window open. If you hover over a specific one, that window becomes the only thing visible for the time.

          • So exactly the same as windows 10? Disappointing.

            • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

              Functional. It works. Unlike anything from Apple.

              • Yeah, I love playing hunt the window. If they’re going to copy Mac OS they should do it properly, not constantly half-ass it.

                • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

                  How many of the same window could you possible be hunting for?

                  • More than one, obviously.

                    • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

                      So, then you aren't really "hunting" for a window then, are you? Unless you've got at least 4 windows of the same application open, you don't need either Windows or the MacOS version. And to be honest, if you've got that many windows of one application open, you're probably fucking something up or doing something stupid.

                    • It never ceases to amaze - the lengths windows fanboys will go to in defense of their defective by design operating system of choice. It's called windows, with an "s" at the end, for a reason. Do you know what apps I routinely open four or more windows in? Excel, edge, shell, chat. They all look almost exactly the same when minimised. Just because you are a one-track non-multitasking simpleton doesn't mean everyone else is.

                    • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

                      Do you know what apps I routinely open four or more windows in? Excel, edge, shell, chat.

                      Lmao, what do you mean? No, they do not. They all have extremely distinctive icons - none of which look even remotely similar to each other. I have Discord, Steam, 3x Edge windows, Email, Visual Studio, Unity and Gimp open at any given time, so I am constantly multitasking. You are barely multitasking, and apparently nearly legally blind if your think those 4 icons look at all the same.

                    • The discussion is about the preview windows looking almost identical. If you open up four excel windows and go to preview, how do you differentiate between them?

                      Why am I arguing with a windows fanboy who thinks one window is more than enough?

                    • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

                      Because the preview windows are live and I can tell the differences between their contents? As well as the different titles for each one? Not to mention they stay in a static order of whichever was opened first. Are MacOS previews not live or don't feature a title or something? I could have 8 different Excel sheets open. None of their contents look exactly the same nor do they have easy to confuse filenames. I would not need to hunt to find which one I need. If all the contents look the same or the filename

  • I don't care about usability but I demand you bring Clippy back, you heartless bastards.
  • Shaking my head (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @09:46PM (#63879969)

    As someone who mostly uses XFCE, I can't understand why Microsoft makes simple things like this seem so hard.

    With XFCE, like many window managers, most of the widgets in the taskbar, as well as the taskbars themselves, are implemented by modular plug-ins. The item in XFCE relevant to this story is the "windows buttons" widget. I can put as many of these as I want on my desktop in as many taskbars as I want (even multiple button sets in the same taskbar), and I can independently control the grouping of each set (I just tried it, and I can have both grouped and ungrouped windows at the same time.) I have similar options for start menus, clocks, notification areas, etc., and all taskbars can be placed and configured exactly how and where I want them.

    This isn't exactly rocket science. It's likely that the nicely usable XFCE windows button widget was written by a volunteer contributor with just a few weeks' effort. Presumably MS, OTOH, has whole departments of "UX" developers who toil diligently to bake annoyingly unconfigurable features into the UI, inflicting endless torment on their hundreds of millions of users, especially when they make arbitrary changes. I can only imagine how many focus groups and long meetings must go into deliberating which "improvements" to hard-code into each upcoming version of Windows.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. This is a problem that has been solved decades ago. I think MS is just constitutionally incapable of doing solid and sound design and implementation. They have to half-ass everything because that is their deepest cultural core value and approach.

      By now this has stacked up to a massive mounten of technological debt in basically all of their products.

  • My company required us to use Edge. The default configuration for Edge is to show each tab as a separate taskbar icon (up to a certain number0. The first thing I did was to turn it off. I don't *want* to see all those icons down there, pretty soon what you're looking for gets lost in all those icons. I'd much rather point to the *one* taskbar icon for, say NP++ or Chrome or Outlook, and see a list of windows for that app only.

  • I mean the whole thing (including the "application" landscape) Microsoft offers is somewhere between "painful to use" and "unusable". No idea why there are still people that expect anything else...

  • ExplorerPatcher [github.com] solves this problem quite nicely.

  • Based on the screenshot of the article, this looks exactly like what it looked like in Windows 10. This guy seems to have wanted something completely different. Calling it "almost unusable" is bullshit.
  • These people complaining about Combined Icons are crazy. Why in the flying fuck would you want more icons of the same program on your taskbar? Why do you want to regress into old, shitty, and bad UI habits? These people probably also have 100 icons on their desktop. 98 of which they never click on after a week.

    "It's just what I prefer..."
    Well, tough shit. Your preferences suck and you need new ones.

  • Cant tell where one inactive window ends and another begins, to raise it for focus. Five inch phone screens with all apps running maximised does not care. I have a 48 in double wide curved monitor... Same behavior? horrible.

    I had follow mouse focus back in the 1990s in my motif window manager. Why can windows support that?

    In a five inch scrren you have no screen real estate and cram stuff on title bar. In a 28 in desktop? Window title is full of controls responding to click. And the only way to repositi

  • Idiot moron thinks he can work on more than 1 thing at a time so he opens 40 windows not realizing that having 40 windows open does nothing but waste resources because you can only work in one window at a time so he gets mad that his little buttons are too wide.
  • The easiest fix for this is to switch to an OS that doesn't ass-rape you with every mouse click.

  • The upvoted request was to support "never combining app icons and showing labels". So what exactly was the feature supposed to look like?
  • It's baffling that Microsoft can't get this feature right after three years with it being one of the most highly requested features.

    That is because they do not want you to do this. They want you to use Windows the way they want. Fuck you and your preferences.

  • There are lots of things to not like about windows, but most of the gripes here on slashdot are about outlier behaviors or niche requirements not being catered to.
    • by suutar ( 1860506 )

      They want to be a widely used operating system, they either get to deal with niche requirements or complaints.

      • They *are* a widely used operating system. Random internet person with an obtuse scenario that they feel requires UI redesign because feelings is not Microsoft's problem to deal with, no matter how loud they scream about it.
  • Why did ms remove the cascade/tile feature from the taskbar?

    How do i close 30 instances of a app(e.g Image viewer) with one click? Answer combine, right click and close all, cant do that with never combine.

    Combine only works if you tell windows to never draw thumbs, and always list the window titles, other wise you are left looking st a dozen windows that al look the same named c:\program⦠Itâ(TM)s completely unusable unless you do reg tweaks

  • or Microsoft could have replicated the Windows 10 feature many of us requested

    Yeah, but then they'd have had to admit that they were [gasp] WRONG!!!!!!

  • "It's baffling that Microsoft can't get this feature right after three years with it being one of the most highly requested features. "

    Microsoft has a whole campus full of brilliant people. Of course they can get it right. They don't want to. There's some other reason they're not doing this.

    I'd say, keep up the pressure. The great unwashed masses will upgrade to 11 or buy computers with 11 already installed, but Microsoft really needs third party developers and power users to develop apps and drivers an

  • The taskbar in 11 just happens to work how I like, though I realize it doesn't for many others. I just want to know when they are adding the "show all" toggle for the notification tray.

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