With Snap, Windows 8 users could display two Metro apps, or one desktop app and one Metro app, side-by-side on-screen.Īs originally implemented, however, Snap was quite limited. And so Microsoft offered a concession, called Snap. Metro-style apps, as they were called, could only run full-screen, an anachronistic limitation on a powerful desktop platform like Windows. In Windows 8, Microsoft added a mobile apps platform that was initially called Metro and was backed by an online apps store, the Windows Store, similar to those found on mobile platforms like Android and iPhone. You could also drag a window to the top of the display to maximize it, or drag a maximized window down to restore it. That changed in Windows 7 with the arrival of Aero Snap, a feature that let you drag a window to the left or right edge of the display, where it would “snap” to that edge and occupy 50 percent of the width of the display. Microsoft finally added overlapping window support to Windows with version 2.03-and yes, Apple did sue, for that and other Windows features that it claimed copied the Mac-and for the next decade and a half or more, the ability to cascade and stack open windows were the only notable window management innovations that Microsoft added to the product.

Instead, windows were full-screen or, when used with other windows, would automatically tile to fill the available space. The roots of this feature date back literally to the earliest days of Windows, when Microsoft, fearful of an intellectual property lawsuit from Apple, decided not to support arbitrarily-sized floating and overlapping application windows.

Snap is a productivity feature that helps users arrange applications and other windows logically on-screen. In Windows 11, Microsoft is improving the Snap window management feature yet again with new features.

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