To close an app on Windows, sometimes it’s not as easy as hitting the Close button—the app might continue sticking around as a background process, or if an app is frozen, hitting the button might not do a thing. Now, Windows 11 is making the taskbar way, way more useful in this regard.
Currently, if you right-click an app on your Windows 11 taskbar, you get the classic option to close the window and another one to pin the app to the taskbar. Now, Microsoft has a new “End task” button alongside those other two options. If you click it, it will completely kill the app in question and the relevant task in the background—basically the same thing as if you went to the Task Manager and looked for the app you wanted to kill in the list of processes. In other words, you can think of it as a hard close button.
The standard procedure for killing tasks involved invoking the Task Manager, typically via the Ctrl+Alt+Delete key combination or by right-clicking the taskbar, navigating through a list of active processes, identifying the problematic application, and manually selecting the option to terminate it. Going to the Task Manager requires several clicks and might be something not a lot of people know how to do or feel comfortable doing, so by just right-clicking on the app you want to kill and hitting that End task button, it’s way easier.
This is not a “new” feature as it’s part of Windows 11 24H2, and that’s been out for a solid few months. But you probably haven’t noticed it, and it has definitely not received enough coverage, because frankly, I can’t tell you enough how much of a big deal this is. This doesn’t replace the good old close button, as you might still want that for cases when, for one, you want to close a window but keep an app running in the background, or to close apps like Chrome in an actually graceful, proper manner—this allows the application to potentially save data, clean up temporary files, and close background processes associated with it at its own pace to ensure no data is corrupted and your workflow is not disrupted.
When an app freezes or becomes unresponsive, the standard close function can’t really do much—sometimes you’ll get a dialog box that will help you shut down the task, and sometimes you won’t. Likewise, there are cases where you want to fully close an app, including all background tasks that might stick around afterwards. For those cases, you have to go to the Task Manager and kill the app there. For some apps that juggle multiple background processes at once, the whole ordeal might occasionally feel like a game of whack-a-mole, trying to shut down the correct main task in an endless list of seemingly identical processes—just try killing Chrome after a while of using it.
With this button, though, it’s as easy as just right-clicking on the app in question, then hitting the “End task” button. It doesn’t get any easier, and it might greatly improve your daily Windows 11 workflow.
If you want to check it out, head to your operating system’s Settings panel, go into the System section, and look for the “For developers” option. There, you should see an option to toggle the option on—it’s not enabled by default right now. It’s available for everyone as of Windows 11 24H2, so make sure to check it out now.
Source: Windows Latest via Techspot
