Windows 11 gets a nifty tweak to kill frozen apps, catching up with macOS

Windows 11 is getting the ability to kill an unresponsive app, known as ‘force closing’ (or force quitting) right from the taskbar in what’ll be a very useful tweak for the OS.

This functionality was previously spotted hidden in test builds of Windows 11, and caused a fair bit of excitement at the time, so it’s good to see Microsoft confirm it is indeed inbound.

The move represents a far more convenient and easy way to deal with a misfiring app than the current scheme of things in Windows 11, where you have to head into the Task Manager and hunt around a bit to accomplish the same feat.

The Verge reports that Microsoft let us know that the ability is coming to Windows 11 at its Build conference for developers.

Quite a bit of stuff has been announced at Build, in fact, and a bunch of minor but important changes along similar lines – like native support for dealing with RAR or 7-Zip files in Windows 11 (instead of having to download and install a third-party utility).

And of course there’s a huge change that has been announced, one we’re viewing with a little trepidation – namely the introduction of AI into Windows 11 in the form of Microsoft’s Copilot.

Analysis: Mirroring the Mac – finally

So, what’s the big deal here? When apps go rogue and freeze up, they can simply hang around, slowing down your system’s performance (perhaps) and generally being annoying.

To force close such an unresponsive app right now in Windows 11, you have to open Task Manager, which is a bit of a faff in itself, unless you know the keyboard shortcut (press Control+Shift+Escape together). Then you must scroll through the list of running processes to find the rogue app, select it, and click the ‘End Task’ button.

With the new option, all you have to do is right-click on the app in the taskbar, and select ‘End Task’ from the context menu – a far easier and quicker way of taming the application that’s gone awry.

As Mac users will realize, this exact ability is something present in macOS, so Windows 11 is catching up to Apple’s desktop operating system in that respect – and it’s about time, to be honest.