Virtual Desktops in Windows 10 / Microsoft Details Improvements Made To Virtual Desktops
We know there’s a vocal set of people who just love virtual desktops. Having desktops beyond the limitations of a physical display is a powerful way to organize and quickly access groups of windows. Virtual desktops aren’t new. In fact, Xerox PARC created one of the earliest virtual desktop experiences called Rooms back in the 1980s and subsequently made a version available for Windows 3.x. Microsoft offered the Virtual Desktop Manager as part of the Windows XP PowerToys and a little while later released the Sysinternals Desktops add-on which enabled similar functionality. Many other OSes and third-party utilities have also embraced the power of virtual desktops. Given the growing popularity of this organizational tool, we decided to build a native virtual desktop experience directly into Windows 10.
When our team set out to build virtual desktops into Windows 10 we first took the time to understand how different people approach organization. For instance, we know that there are “filers” who like to separate things into subsets and then there are “pilers” who prefer to tackle tasks in a single group. We see this regularly with the way people handle email and directory structures for files. The same approaches also apply to open windows on a desktop. For those of you who like to organize your windows, we want to make sure that we offer the right experience to create and manage these groups. Here are some high-level goals we identified:
Give you more desktop space to group related windows
Help you quickly locate and switch to any window or group of windows
Let you easily re-organize your groups and move windows as tasks evolve
Keep you in control of the degree of separation between your grouped windows