Being a portable application, Taskbar Tweaker does not require installation and can be run directly, making it easy to use across different Windows installations.

He found ExplorerPatcher on a dusty GitHub forum. No installer wizard—just a setup.exe and a warning: "Use at your own risk. Microsoft might break this tomorrow."

It explains why simple tweaks are no longer possible and details the complexity of reverse-engineering the new Windows shell.

One double-click. A flicker. Explorer crashed and rebooted.

But he didn't revert. Instead, he found —a modular tweaker. He installed the "Taskbar Labels for Windows 11" mod. Then the "Disable Taskbar Grouping" mod. Then the "Always Show All Tray Icons" mod.

Because the Windows 11 taskbar is a complete rewrite (dropping the classic explorer.exe code for a XAML-based interface), the popular does not work on Windows 11 by default. The tool that effectively replaces it for Win11 users is ExplorerPatcher .