Believe me, I am not splitting hairs, or trying to make a big issue of this, but I am trying to find clarification for the use of the quick launch in Windows 7/8. It was originally invented, so that users could place their most used shortcuts somewhere visible, rather than the desktop, where they are hidden by other opened programs. With the introduction of the ability to "Pin" shortcuts to the taskbar, in Vista, there was no longer any useful function. It has finally been dropped in Windows 8. Could those who still try and implement it, and are, therefore, using the desktop in Windows 8, please tell me why they see it as an advantage?
That's a little confused. It wasn't Vista that introduced pinning, it was Windows 7. That said, your premise is correct; the Quick Launch bar is obsolete in Windows 7 and was always pretty lame. Before Windows 7, I'd disable it and use an alternative program launcher like jetToolbar, because the whole Start Menu/Desktop (and later Quick Launch) means of launching programs was always horribly inadequate, which I recognized when I first saw it in 1995 having used similar systems in the past, except for the Start Menu, which was uniquely horrible, being hard to navigate and GOING AWAY when something is selected from it, forcing you to do the whole navigation all over again from scratch.
It
is puzzling why a lot of people cling to Quick Launch and not only fail to recognize the greatness of the Windows 7 taskbar merging the original window-switching mission of the taskbar with program launching and the new jump lists, progress indicators, etc, but actually
hate it. I would estimate at least half my posts on this board have been attempts to educate a number of people on these things, but they just don't get it. People
like their systems with slab buttons that appear at semi-random locations and display useless, ugly truncated text, just like they learned it in Windows 95, things I always hated. They moan about the taskbar taking up more space, but I would wager the vast majority of them can afford to give up some space, if they would just try it. As I've written before several times, I'm sympathetic to being reluctant to do that and was surprised that it was not only OK but worked out
great. Meanwhile, they don't care that using Quick Launch means you waste space when you run programs because you've got icons in two places on the taskbar. They also don't care about wasting space in the taskbar when it's not full of window icons for active programs and is almost completely empty. Again, I've written a ton of posts talking about these things. Here's
a recent one, and it links to an older one where I go into detail on what I use and why and give a screenshot.