Assigning a Win32 process Task Manager "Description" column value in Windows 11

Question

In previous versions of Windows, the "Description" column on the "Details" tab in Task Manager always comes from the process's main image description metadata.

However, in Windows 11 this does not always appear to be the case. The WebView2 component, which operates like Chromium usually does, runs multiple worker processes out of the same executable; however it displays different description values in Windows 11's updated Task Manager for many of these worker processes:

All of these processes are using the same base executable; so while Task Manager appears to still be showing the executable image's description as the original value, there must be some new mechanism to override the use of this value and use an application-supplied string instead. It also appears Task Manager may be the only tool that honors this new provided description, since the latest version of Process Explorer doesn't appear to surface the information.

I've done lots of searching on this issue and haven't been able to find any documentation on how this is done (in fact I haven't even found any references anywhere that anyone else has even noticed that this is happening/possible); as most discussion on the issue only covers the pre-Windows 11 Task Manager behavior.

How is this done, and is this functionality available for arbitrary Win32 applications? (I ask because I have the same type of multi-process/single-executable architecture in an application, and it would be very helpful to add specialized descriptions for each separate process like WebView2 does.)

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this is just because the Windows Task Manager knows some processes "intimately".

Rename any .exe as msedgewebview2.exe and use some "known" command line for example:

msedgewebview2.exe --type=crashpad-handler

and your process' description will be "Crashpad" :-)

This can be also checked by looking directly into taskmgr.exe