Windows 11 apps may soon annoy us with more notifications
No, Microsoft. If I want to pin that app, I’ll do it myself.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
As a Windows 11 user, you may have run into the same issues that I have with the notification centre. You kind of want to leave notifications on in case you miss anything, and while you can’t really be bothered to customise them individually to prevent everything from bugging you, you also kinda want it to just leave you the heck alone.
Well, now Microsoft looks set to add yet another way for apps to infiltrate your notifications bar in the form of a new API soon to roll out to app devs. It will allow apps to automatically ask for permission to pin their apps to your taskbar, as well as ask to become the default app.
Because that won’t be annoying at all.
In a recent Microsoft UXblog post, the company announced a “principled approach to app pinning”, one that is meant to “put people in control of their Windows PC experience” by giving them theprivilegeto deny apps permissions. That’s nice of Microsoft, isn’t it.
The blog post notes that the API will invoke a new popup window that will let you know a new app (or very likely each time an app gets auto updated) wants to be pinned to your taskbar.
Not only will the API let devs ask permission for their apps to be pinned to the taskbar, unprompted, they will also be able to ask for default app permissions. So, similarly to every time you accidentally open Internet Explorer and it pops up asking “do you want to make this your default browser?”, so too will other apps have their opportunity to live in the limelight.
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMDBest gaming motherboard: The right boardsBest graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaitsBest SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest
It comes as an extension to the currentms-setting: URI scheme, and will soon add the functionality for a new “settings deep link URI” that will let apps send you straight to the appropriate default apps settings menu.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
While this is going to be helpful for first time users, and anyone who’s unsure of how to navigate the settings menus (search for “default” in the start bar), it’s going to get real annoying for people, like me, who tend to switch between a bunch of different apps on the daily.
The changes are coming to the Windows Insider Dev Channel flight within the next few months or so, and if received well, could worm their way onto your desktop.
Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she’s waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.
It looks like ‘Windows Intelligence’ might subsume ‘Copilot’ branding, giving yet more evidence that we can’t decide how to market AI
CrowdStrike is having problems with Windows again but thankfully just with 24H2 and just in some Office programs
I desperately hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium inspire more RPG devs to reject the traditional drip, drip, drip of DLC and expansions
