Microsoft today released a new Windows 10 preview for PCs with Edge, shell, notification, input, gaming, Task Manager, and Hyper-V improvements. This is the sixth build of the upcoming Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, which is slated to arrive later this year (likely in September).
Windows 10 is a service, meaning it was built in a very different way from its predecessors so it can be regularly updated with not just fixes, but new features, too. Microsoft has released many such updates, including three major ones: November Update, Anniversary Update, and Creators Update.
First up, Edge can now read aloud any webpage and PDF with word and line highlighting. The Share UI now matches the Edge theme if it is different from the rest of the system and launches under the Share button (rather than in the center of the browser). There’s also a new animation when you add a favorite and a bunch of small bug fixes.
Next, the Windows Shell has been updated to squash a really annoying bug for those that have a high DPI display and change the display scaling value. You no longer have to log out and back in to fix blurry desktop apps after docking, undocking, and remoting. Windows now provides DPI-related information to these applications such that each time one of them starts, they’ll get updated data from the operating system. Simply re-launching is enough to render them correctly if they’re blurry.
Notification buttons now span across the bottom of the notification, rather than being right-justified. It’s now easier to take action on your notifications as the first one auto-expands in each notification group in the Action Center. The X for dismissing notifications has been changed to an arrow — Microsoft hopes this makes it more clear that the notification is actually being pushed to the Action Center to be reviewed later. Notification badges for people pinned to the taskbar will now be consistent with the color of your theme and receiving emoji from people pinned to the taskbar is now referred to as a “pop”.
The emoji panel now supports type to search for emoji 5.0, plus a bunch more keywords. Also, if you hover your mouse over any of the emoji in the Emoji Panel, you’ll now see the exact Unicode character name. The touch keyboard is now more accurate (particularly for one-handed use), makes a sound with each key press (like the old one), and is better at learning your typing style (meaning better text predictions the more you type and correct).
The smallest update is probably the new Game Mode icon on the Game bar. We’re not even sure why it was changed.
The GPU performance tracker in Task Manager has received an updated UI layout and more details like DirectX version and the physical location of your GPU. Only hardware GPUs show up in the list, and the software-only basic display adapter is hidden.
Lastly, Hyper-V users will see a new “virtual machine gallery” under quick create, but this is just a placeholder. Choosing “Local installation source” will allow you to pick an image from your computer and the options for VM Name and networking went are now in the “More options” section. Best of all, Hyper-V on Windows 10 now provides a default network so your virtual machines share networking with your computer using NAT.
This desktop build includes the following bug fixes and improvements:
- Fixed an issue from the last flight where doing a PC reset via Settings > Update & security > Recovery and choosing “Remove everything” might put your device into a reboot loop. It is now safe to use this option again.
- Fixed the issue causing some inbox apps to be displayed with a name that looked like “ms-resource:” and listed at the bottom of Start.
- Fixed an issue from recent flights resulting in the Photos, Groove Music, and certain other app’s live tiles not working.
- Fixed a high hitting crash impacting Start and Cortana in recent flights.
- Fixed a recent issue where you’d find two Connect apps in Start – one as expected, with a blue app icon, one unexpected with a light grey app icon and non-functional.
- Updated Start so that if you press and hold on an app in the all apps list, the context menu will now appear after a moment, rather than first having to lift your finger.
- Added a new option to Cortana to enable or disable showing your cloud content in the search results.
- Fixed an issue where Cortana search might drop the first typed character if Microsoft Edge was the foreground app.
- Fixed an issue from recent flights where Alt+<number> wasn’t working in Win32 apps to input special characters.
- Fixed an issue resulting in the up/down keys potentially hanging input when used after typing something into certain search boxes that offered dropdown suggestions.
- Fixed an issue where the Network & Internet Status Settings page might say a network was public even though it had been set to be private using the Control Panel.
- Fixed an issue where the “More”/“Less” text wasn’t localized in the custom color picker in Color Settings.
- Fixed an issue where switching away and back to Windows Spotlight in Lock Screen Settings resulted in an infinite spinner in the preview image.
- Disabled Chinese (Simplified) dictation — it will be back once there is a smoother experience. Voice input for English (United States) will still be available.
- Fixed an issue from the last few flights where Task Manager was frequently hanging on launch for some Insiders.
- Fixed an issue from the last flight resulting in Storage Spaces unexpectedly erroneously saying there was no disk space available.
- Addressed a recent issue where Win32 apps (for example PowerShell and Command prompt) were blocked by Device Guard after upgrading using the Pro edition on a Surface Laptop.
- Fixed an issue some people were experiencing resulting in content copied from Screen Sketch and pasted elsewhere appearing to be just a black box rather than the expected sketch.
- Fixed the issue causing Xbox Live in-game experiences such as gamer profiles, achievement details, and other dialogs to fail to load.
- Updated the Win32 MessageBox to now be natively per-monitor DPI aware! That means it should no longer be blurry when used in mixed DPI environments, or when changing DPI. Curious to try it? One place in particular MessageBox is used is in Notepad, in the error dialog that pops up if you search for a word that’s not found in the text.
Today’s update bumps the Windows 10 build number for PCs from 16232 (made available to testers on June 28) to build 16237.
This build has seven known issues, so make sure to check those before updating.