You may have noticed that the apps you’ve pinned to the taskbar are on the left, and the regular apps are on the right.¹ But sometimes, a pinned app goes to the right. Why is that?
There is no “pinned apps” section of the taskbar. The taskbar just has one area for apps, and some of the apps are pinned, and some of the apps are not pinned. Now, it so happens that over time, pinned apps tend to migrate to the left. But that’s an artifact of the behavior of the taskbar, not because there’s a “pinned apps” section.
Let’s see how things turn out the way they do.
First, observe that new apps go at the end.
Second, pinned apps stay on the taskbar even if the app isn’t running.
These two rules together mean that pinned apps will tend to move toward the left: If there is a non-pinned app on the taskbar, it will get closed eventually, and then it loses its spot. When the app is relaunched, it goes back to the end.
Imagine an organization where some members have access to sabbatical leave and others do not. Furthermore, suppose that offices are assigned in seniority order. You end up with all the best offices going to people who have access to sabbatical leave, even though that was never actually written into the rules.
You get this phenomenon because people with sabbatical leave can take a leave without losing their seniority. Whereas people without access to sabbatical leave have no choice but to resign, and then rejoin the organization later, which puts them back at the bottom of the seniority list.
The “pinned apps” area is an analogous phenomenon: Since pinned apps never lose their place, whereas unpinned apps lose their place when they are closed, you end up with the pinned apps gravitating toward the left.
Once you realize that this is is an emergent behavior, you can easily come up with a way for a pinned app to end up to the right of an unpinned app: The app was originally not pinned, and then you pinned it. Pinning an app does not move it, so it remains where it is, which is near the end of the taskbar.
Of course, as you close unpinned apps that exist to the left of the newly-pinned app, the newly-pinned app will slide left one slot, and over time it will eventually find itself next to the other pinned apps.
But it’s not like there’s a special “pinned apps” section. It’s just that pinned apps tend to have the highest seniority because they never lose their place.
¹ At least, that’s how it is for left-to-right languages. For right-to-left languages, it’s the other way around. More precisely, “You may have noticed that all the apps you’ve pinned to the taskbar are on the side closer to the Start button, and all the regular apps are on the side closer to the notification icons and the clock.”
One unrelated question regarding taskbar buttons – why taskbar icon badges are enabled only for large taskbar buttons which are quite unusable on a vertical taskbar due to huge vertical margins (which multiplies with every button)?
Personally, I don’t care much about esthetics, but I care a lot about functionality, which is limited using small taskbar buttons since I miss badge notifications…
I still use Quick Launch instead (which still works as of Windows 10 ver 1809) precisely because I can have a separate SECTION (that I prefer to be close to the clock, not the Start button).
Just like the Brazil Nuts in mixed nuts, they tends to float at the top. (My taskbar is placed vertically)
There are a couple of apps that I have pinned which create a second "instance" of an entry in the taskbar, i.e. the pinned app icon is still on the left side, the currently open app window is a new instance way on the right (so I see the app twice, not grouped as for other apps). I don't know why this is happening and thought you'd answer this behavior here. Is the pinned shortcut...
“First, observe that new apps go at the end” unless a unrelated instance of said app is already running (Windows 7 and later).
My pet peeve; If I have [Notepad – DevNotes.txt][Visual Studio][Maps] and then open Recipies.txt there is no way to stop it from grouping with the other Notepad instance and there is no setting to go back to the classic Win95..Vista mode without 3rd-party hacks.
Go the taskbar settings and set the “Combine taskbar buttons” options to “never” and enable “use small taskbar buttons” and you get back the classic Win95 mode.
This is how I work and I hope Microsoft never removes the option to use the old-style taskbar.
It will still force all taskbar buttons of the same AppModelId/.exe to be next to each other, you can’t have [Notepad][Calc][Notepad] etc. Replicating the classic style is not possible after Win7 added AppModelIds.
Yeah, I forgot about that. I end up using one of those “3rd-party hacks” called “7+ taskbar tweaker” to turn off AppID grouping. I also set middle-click to close an application rather than launch another instance.