I’ve blogged about some of the bits of this before, but just for convenience sake, here’s all the steps together.
1. Open up regedit and go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
Create a new String Value called MinWidth and set the value to -255.
2. Right click on the taskbar, and click properties, tick ‘Group Similar taskbar buttons’ and click OK
3. Install Visual Task Tips from http://www.visualtasktips.com/ and log off/on again.
Here’s a Screenshot of your resulting Windows XP Super Taskbar in action:
The Windows 7 bar also allows programs to show up little submenus with actions. This feature has been much talked about as a brilliant new addition to the taskbar in Windows 7, but it is already possible in XP. Not many apps seem to support it, but it can be done, as demonstrated by the lovely J River Media Jukebox:
One Missing Feature
The first screenshot above is showing two instances of chrome, rather than two tabs in chrome. This is one advantage windows 7 has over this. Until someone writes an XP util that duplicates this functionality (which, lets face it, will likely never happen) then we’re stuck with only showing window instances.
One Unfortunate Side Effect
Windows minimized in Photoshop CS3 (and probably other versions) seem to inherit the width from the MinWidth value, so you may come across this problem:
I can’t find a way around it except to access these windows via the window menu, if anyone comes across a fix let me know.