Today, Microsoft is releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview build 25201 to the Dev channel. While these builds tend to ship weekly, this one actually has a couple of new features.
Most notable, there’s a new expanded view for widgets, which is essentially a full-screen view. The concept is pretty obvious. With the current widget view, you might not be able to see all of your content without scrolling. With the expanded view, you can. You’ll see an expansion icon in the top-right corner of the widgets view, which you can also use to put it back in the more compact view.
Also, when you change the size of the widgets panel, Windows 11 will remember your state, so until you change it again, that’s how it will be every time you open it up.
There are also improvements to the Xbox Game Pass widget, that being the ability to sign into your Microsoft account. That way, you’ll see more personalized options. You’ll see games that are available to you based on your Game Pass tier, you’ll see recently played games, and more.
As usual, there are also a bunch of fixes included in the build.
Windows 11 build 25201 Fixes
[General]
- Thank you to all the Insiders who gave us feedback on the different visual treatments for search on the taskbar! Starting with this week’s flight, we are concluding the exploration of these treatments, so if you received this experience, it will be removed on your next reboot.
[File Explorer]
- File Explorer search will now show results as you type. The full search results page will update live without needing to press enter. We are beginning to roll this out, so the experience isn’t available to all Insiders just yet.
- We’re experimenting with adding more cloud files to search results from Home.
Fixes
[General]
- Fixed the issue in the last few flights causing a bugcheck when moving your mouse in certain games.
[File Explorer]
- As a one-time change to help people find their folders with the navigation pane updates, if the default folders pinned to File Explorer’s navigation pane had been unpinned, they will be re-pinned after upgrading.
- Fixed a memory leak which was happening when closing File Explorer windows.
[Taskbar]
- The apps in the taskbar overflow flyout should now be in the correct order when using an Arabic or Hebrew display language.
[Input]
- Fixed an issue where if you hadn’t already opened OneNote once, using the pen click to invoke OneNote wouldn’t work.
- Made a change to help address an issue where it wasn’t possible to use the Pinyin IME to type in the chat box of certain games.
[Settings]
- Fixed an issue which was causing sporadic Settings app crashes.
- Removed an erroneous white pixel in the icon animation when clicking the Apps category in Settings.
[Widgets]
- We have fixed the issue where in some cases, the notification banner for some badging would not appear in the widgets board.
[Windowing]
- Fixed an issue where explorer.exe was crashing if you dragged a snap group in Task View and dropped it into another Desktop.
- Fixed an issue related to interacting with the Desktops flyout in the taskbar which was causing periodic explorer.exe crashes.
- Fixed a DWM crash in the last few flights which could lead to a brief black screen when rotating a tablet.
- Fixed a rare issue which could cause a DWM crash when watching videos in certain UWP apps in recent builds.
[Task Manager]
- Fixed an issue impacting Task Manager reliability.
[Other]
- Fixed an issue causing some Insiders to unexpectedly get the message “it is not possible to connect to this network” when connecting to certain Wi-Fi networks recently, although the network was working with other devices.
- Fixed an issue which could lead to Windows Sandbox opening to just a black window on certain PCs.
As usual, this build is just considered to be Windows 11 vNext. As is always the case with the Dev channel, Microsoft is shipping experimental features. That means that while it continues to try out features, these features may or may not ever ship, and as for when they’d arrive, that’s totally up in the air. You can bet that they won’t be a part of this year’s Windows 11 feature update though, as that’s completely feature-locked.
Source: Microsoft