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Microsoft improves Windows 11 Start menu, no new ads in sight, and there's a lock screen bonus in latest preview

Microsoft improves Windows 11 Start menu, no new ads in sight, and there's a lock screen bonus in latest preview

Windows 11 has a new preview version and it comes with some notable interface changes (for the better, thankfully, as there are no new ads or promotions to be seen anywhere).

Microsoft has just pushed Windows 11 build 22635 (KB5041876) to the Beta Channel, and the most interesting change is a hidden one, as spotted by regular leaker PhantomOfEarth on X (who regularly discovers features not yet in testing by enabling them via a Windows configuration tool).

The category view for Home > All apps has been updated in 22635.4082: Tooltips containing app names are now displayed on hover, and the categories themselves are different. pic.twitter.com/LVu3RHy4YeAugust 26, 2024

As you can see in the post above, the (hidden) 'All apps' category view of the Start menu now not only has icons representing all the apps displayed in each category, but also tooltips for their names when you hover over them.

The categories are mentioned in a follow-up tweet as having now been changed to reflect the same categories used in the Microsoft Store, the leaker notes based on a clue discovered while poking around in Windows 11's Start menu assets.

It looks like the category view will group apps using the same categories that the Microsoft Store uses. In this build, they're numbered. You can see which apps go where in “C:WindowsSystemAppsMicrosoftWindows.Client.Core_cw5n1h2txyewyStartMenuAssetsAllAppCategoryMappings.json” pic.twitter.com/ztA3TjVavVAugust 26, 2024

Elsewhere in build 22635, as Microsoft explains in the regular blog post, work has been done on the lock screen, so media controls are now displayed at the bottom of the screen when audio content is playing. This is rounded off by a blur effect on images, which is a nice touch, PhantomOfEarth notes elsewhere.

On top of that, Microsoft has tweaked another tweak made in previous tests, namely the introduction of notification suggestions, through which Windows 11 will suggest turning off notifications for any app if you don't interact with it for some time. This preview build shows the ability to turn off those suggestions (as opposed to notifications themselves, we should clarify).

There are a bunch of common fixes here too, including resolutions for crashes with File Explorer and the Start menu.

(Image credit: Ollyy / Shutterstock)

Analysis: More options are always good

It's good to see that work is progressing nicely on the new category view in the All Apps pane. As we've discussed before, this is a refreshing design change from the default app list in the Start menu, a cumbersome layout that's simply presented in alphabetical order (forcing you to do a lot of scrolling, possibly, if you have a lot of software installed).

Those who feel the category layout is perhaps more cluttered to look at and prefer the list view because they feel it's more streamlined will be able to stick with that, by the way. There will be a choice offered that includes the default list, this new category view, and another grid view that's also in preview (if the latter two options ever make it out of testing, that is, they may not, only time will tell).

For us, we think locating apps using organized categories could be quite useful, though it's not surprising to see Microsoft adopt the categories used in its store here (hopefully that's not a sign that the store will be promoted in some way in this new version of the interface).

The way things are going, we assume this functionality will be available in preview soon, but it's probably too late to make it into Windows 11 24H2 at this stage.

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