Windows 11 has a handy hidden shortcut that lets you kill frozen apps with a minimum of fuss

Windows 11 has a neat little feature hidden away that has just been discovered, and it's all about making it far easier to accomplish a semi-regular chore - namely dealing with a misbehaving app.

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End task feature has escaped from Task Manager and is now at large on the desktop, last seen in the taskbar (Image Credit: Microsoft)

Tom's Hardware spotted that a new option is in Windows 11 - though it may have been introduced some time back - to force-close an unresponsive app just by right-clicking it in the taskbar.

Before now, having to deal with a frozen app involved heading to the Task Manager, hunting through the list of running processes, finding the offender, and then force-closing it here via the 'end task' option.

With this change - which needs to be enabled in Settings to work - you can simply click on an app's icon in the taskbar and close it right there.

Want to try this out? Then you'll need to head into the Settings app, go to 'System' and then 'For developers' where you'll find a slider to turn on the feature to end a task in the taskbar.

Typically, this isn't somewhere the average Windows 11 user will go - be aware that this is developer-related stuff - but this particular tweak won't cause any harm, of course. It's just a nice additional bit of functionality.

Indeed, we're not quite sure why this is hidden away in the developer panel in Settings - it's not like only devs have to deal with misfiring apps that have frozen or crashed, everyone does. We're thinking Microsoft might relocate the option at some point (and just bring in the functionality for Windows 11 by default, eventually - you never know).

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