Windows

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 10 22H2 Build 19045.5552 (KB5052077) to the Release Preview Channel for Insiders who are on Windows 10, version 22H2. This update includes the following features and improvements (items bolded in brackets indicate the area of the change being documented): [Daylight saving time (DST)] This update supports (DST) changes in Paraguay. [Input Method Editor (IME)] Fixed: The Chinese IME stops responding when you change the font family or font size. Fixed: The color contrast ratio of the Chinese IME search suggestion panel is less than you expect. [dwm.exe] Fixed: It stops responding many times. [Country and Operator Settings Asset] This update brings COSA profiles up to date for certain mobile operators. [Narrator] Fixed: It fails to say the Chinese IME candidate window quick action buttons right. Fixed: It does not say the control type for the Chinese IME suggestion opt-in item. Fixed: It does not say the heading of the Chinese IME suggestion opt-in panel. [Open Secure Shell (OpenSSH) (known issue)] Fixed: The service fails to start, which stops SSH connections. There is no detailed logging, and you must run the sshd.exe process manually. Thanks, The Windows Insider Program TeamView the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we’re releasing Windows 11 Build 22631.4969 (KB5052094) to Insiders in the Release Preview Channel on Windows 11, version 23H2 (Build 22631). Below is a summary of the new features and improvements included as part of this update separated into two sections: gradual rollout and normal rollout. The bold text within the brackets indicates the item or area of the change we are documenting. Gradual rollout The following features and improvements might not be available to all users because they will roll out gradually. Text bolded in brackets indicate the area of the change being documented. [Taskbar] New! You can now share files directly from a jump list on the taskbar. Jump lists appear when you right-click an app that has a jump list. [Windows Spotlight] New! There’s a quick and easy way to find out more information about a background image. Simply hover over the image or click the “Learn about this picture” icon. New! This update makes Windows Spotlight easier to find. You’ll notice changes to the icon color and background. Also, the icon will show at the lower right area on your desktop. [Lock screen] New! This update makes it easier to learn more about the image on your lock screen when you click the “Like” icon. [Narrator] New! There are new functions for Narrator scan mode. Skip past links (n) allows you to go to the text after a link. Use the comma (,) to jump to the start of an item (large table, long list, or another item.) Use the period (.) to jump to the end of an item. This is most helpful when you read long emails, news articles, and wiki pages. Jump to lists (l) allows you to quickly access a list on a web page or in a document. To use these new functions, turn on Narrator first (Windows logo key + Ctrl + Enter). Then turn scan mode on by pressing Caps lock + Spacebar. Note that scan mode is on by default on most web pages (like news articles, wiki page, and so on). [Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers] New! Some of you might see a new referral card for a PC Game Pass subscription on the Settings home page. With it, you can invite friends and family to try a PC Game Pass for free. If you qualify, the card only appears when you sign in to your PC using your Microsoft account. [File Explorer] New! You can now snooze or turn off the “Start backup” reminder in the File Explorer address bar. This only applies if you are not already backing up your files and folder. To view this new option, right-click Start backup. Fixed: When you enter a URL in the address bar, it might not go to the location. Fixed: The address bar overlaps files when you use the F11 full-screen mode. Fixed: The context menu opens slowly when you right-click cloud files. Thumbnails for cloud files display more consistently in search results. [Start menu] Fixed: The colors are wrong when you open the account manager flyout menu. This occurs when you use a mixed dark and light custom mode in Settings > Personalization > Colors. [Mouse] Fixed: In Settings > Accessibility > Mouse pointer and touch, you can choose a color for the mouse that is not the default. When you choose a color, it reverts to white after the User Account Control (UAC) dialog appears. Normal rollout This update includes the following features and improvements that are rolling out as part of this update. Text bolded in brackets indicates the area of the change being documented. [File Explorer] We are disabling account-based content in File Explorer under Recent, Favorites, Details Pane, and Recommended for Entra IDs in the European Economic Area (EEA). [Daylight saving time (DST)] This update supports (DST) changes in Paraguay. [dwm.exe] Fixed: It stops responding many times. [Country and Operator Settings Asset] This update brings COSA profiles up to date for certain mobile operators. [Open Secure Shell (OpenSSH) (known issue)] Fixed: The service fails to start, which stops SSH connections. There is no detailed logging, and you must run the sshd.exe process manually. Thanks, Windows Insider Program TeamView the full article

Microsoft Edge is very pleased to announce our participation in the fifth edition of the Interop project: Interop 2025. We're joining forces with our colleagues at Apple, Bocoup, Igalia, Google, and Mozilla, to improve interoperability on the web platform. Interoperability matters because it ensures that the code you write for the web will work the same way for your users regardless of browser and device. The Interop project is a yearly effort where browser implementers survey developers about top pain-points and agree on areas where we will concentrate resources to drive to full interoperability. Over the past four years, Interop has highlighted areas where bugs in engines prevented widespread adoption of important features, from CSS styling and layout to new HTML elements and web APIs. In 2024, Interop helped resolve important issues in multiple areas, including: The Popover API, which allows you to display content on top of other page content declaratively using HTML, is now fully supported across all browsers. Declarative shadow DOM, which lets you create shadow roots directly in HTML, by using the <template> element, is now also fully supported and implementation quality across browsers has been improved. CSS nesting, which lets you write shorter selectors, by nesting rules within other rules, now works the same across all browsers and allows for a “relaxed” syntax that matches what you might have experienced with CSS pre-processors. The way that browsers compute the accessible names and roles of the elements on the page is now consistent, improving the experience of assistive technology users. Interop 2025 brings about an ambitious list of focus areas for this year's Interop project, and we are looking forward to a successful collaboration. As with prior years, many proposals were submitted, and we received a lot of input and comments on them. Thank you for the time you spent telling us about how the web platform could be better for your use cases! Your feedback was key in helping focus our efforts on the areas where we can make a positive impact. The areas that all browsers agreed to focus on in 2025 include: Anchor positioning, to place elements based on the position of other elements. View Transitions, to create animated visual transitions between different states of a document. Navigation API, to initiate, intercept, and modify browser navigation actions, making it easier for applications to manage user state changes. backdrop-filter, to apply graphical effects such as blurring or color shifting to the area behind an element. JSON module scripts, to make it easy to import JSON data in JavaScript modules. Core Web Vitals LCP and INP metrics, to measure the user experience quality of your site. Storage Access API, to help remove third-party cookies while still supporting user authentication flows. Layout, to continue improving the implementation quality of two fundamental primitives of the web: Grid and Flexbox. Pointer and mouse events Legacy mutation events removal @scope scrollend event text-decoration <details> element URLPattern WebAssembly Web Compat WebRTC Writing modes For more details on the above focus areas, see the full description on the Interop GitHub repository. And, if you want to follow the progress of the project over the course of the year, check out the Interop 2025 dashboard. However, we want to acknowledge that we also hear frustration from developers that some long-lived interoperability concerns are still outstanding, and that the process for choosing focus areas in the Interop project is opaque. We are committed to providing better visibility into these ongoing interoperability gaps. Last year, Edge launched a supplementary Top Developer Needs dashboard to fill this visibility gap and track the improvements made to address these long-lived issues. Some of the top issues we’re tracking, such as scroll-driven animations and anchor positioning, were addressed in 2024 and late-breaking progress on View Transitions also helped set the stage for Interop 2025. We will be updating this dashboard in the coming weeks and will continue to lobby within the Interop group for increased transparency and an end to confidential vetoes. We're excited about the improvements that the Interop project will bring about this year, and we thank you again for submitting proposals and sharing your input. These proposals, as well as other developer signals, such as surveys, help us understand what's important to you.View the full article

Xbox Wire’s Mike Nelson provides an in-depth exploration of a new region in Avowed: The Living Lands, which exists within the universe of Eora. Nelson interviewed the team behind the game, Obsidian, about this area, “where souls are real and gods exist.” “When you’re informed by those two basic facts, it guides a lot about both the kind of content you develop and the tone and flavor you give it,” explains Game Director Carrie Patel. “Part of what made the Living Lands an appealing setting is the promise of having distinct environments and biomes, making you feel like you’re traversing a big, wild land.” Avowed launches Feb. 18 and will be available on the Xbox app for Windows PC, Xbox Series X|S, Battle.net, Steam, cloud and on day one with Game Pass. Read more from Nelson on Xbox Wire.View the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4880 (KB5052100) to the Beta Channel. Please note this build will only be provided to Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel who did not upgrade to receiving updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2. Changes in Beta Channel builds and updates are documented in two buckets: new features, improvements, and fixes that are being gradually rolled out for Insiders who have turned on the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available (via Settings > Windows Update*) and then new features, improvements, and fixes rolling out to everyone in the Beta Channel. For more information, see the Reminders section at the bottom of this blog post. Changes and Improvements gradually being rolled out to the Beta Channel with toggle on* [General] This update includes a small set of general improvements and fixes that improve the overall experience for Insiders running this build on their PCs. Fixes gradually being rolled out to the Beta Channel with toggle on* [Settings] Fixed the issue causing the Home page of Settings to crash for some Insiders. Known issues [File Explorer] We’re investigating an issue causing File Explorer to be very slow to close for some Insiders when closing using the X button. This may also impact the other title bar buttons. [Settings] There is a known issue where the two new enterprise-specific device info and accessibility preferences cards are showing up on non-managed PCs signed in with Microsoft accounts. Paint Update We are rolling out an update for Paint (version 11.2412.271.0 and higher) to Windows Insiders in the Beta and Release Preview Channels. In this update, we are introducing the Copilot menu to Paint where you can access all the intelligent features which help you complete your image generation and editing tasks faster. Clicking on the Copilot icon from the toolbar will expand into a drop-down menu where you can easily access the features Cocreator, Image Creator, Generative erase, and Remove background. Note that Cocreator is only available on Copilot+ PCs. Within the dropdown, each feature will also include a short description to help you choose the right tool. [caption id="attachment_177577" align="alignnone" width="634"] Paint Copilot menu opened.[/caption] FEEDBACK: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Apps > Paint. Reminders for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel will receive updates based on Windows 11, version 23H2 via an enablement package (Build 22635.xxxx). Many features in the Beta Channel are rolled out using Control Feature Rollout technology, starting with a subset of Insiders and ramping up over time as we monitor feedback to see how they land before pushing them out to everyone in this channel. For Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel who want to be the first to get features gradually rolled out to you, you can turn ON the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available via Settings > Windows Update*. Over time, we will increase the rollouts of features to everyone with the toggle turned on. Should you keep this toggle off, new features will gradually be rolled out to your PC over time once they are ready. Features and experiences included in these builds may never get released as we try out different concepts and get feedback. Features may change over time, be removed, or replaced and never get released beyond Windows Insiders. Some of these features and experiences could show up in future Windows releases when they’re ready. Some features in active development we preview with Windows Insiders may not be fully localized and localization will happen over time as features are finalized. As you see issues with localization in your language, please report those issues to us via Feedback Hub. Because the Dev and Beta Channels represent parallel development paths from our engineers, there may be cases where features and experiences show up in the Beta Channel first. Check out Flight Hub for a complete look at what build is in which Insider channel. Thanks, Amanda & BrandonView the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27788 to the Canary Channel. We are also not planning to release SDKs for 27xxx series builds for the time being. What’s new with Build 27788 Windows MIDI Services Public Preview We’re excited to release the first in-box public preview of Windows MIDI Services, our complete rewrite of MIDI on Windows with a focus on a great experience for musicians and a strong foundation for future expansion and enhancement. MIDI is the standard, first released in 1983, that is used to synchronize synthesizers and drum machines in almost all modern electronic music. It’s used to record and play back note information, control stage lights and effects, keep mixers in a large venue in sync, and so much more. Although it is not itself audio, the MIDI protocol is essential to making music and was heavily used in the rise of hip-hop and other genres. MIDI 2.0 is the first major update to the core MIDI protocol since 1983, offering everything that modern musicians need today, like increased speed and fidelity, better control of instruments, modern bi-directional conversations and negotiation between instruments, discovery, better USB timing, and more. Windows MIDI Services is our new MIDI stack which handles not only MIDI 2.0 but also brings our MIDI 1.0 implementation up to modern expectations. It works on 64-bit operating systems on all supported processors, including Arm64. Windows MIDI Services offers the following benefits: Full support of the MIDI 2.0 Standard, including high-speed data transmission, higher-fidelity messages, increased resolution for controller values, and full in-service MIDI 2.0 endpoint discovery and protocol negotiation. Faster transports, leading to better timing and reduced jitter. Faster USB MIDI driver with full support for both MIDI 1.0 and MIDI 2.0. Every endpoint is now multi-client, meaning multiple apps can use a device at the same time. Better endpoint and port In-service scheduling of outgoing timestamped messages, and timestamped incoming messages, for apps using the new Windows MIDI Services App SDK. Built-in loopback and app-to-app MIDI Automatic translation between MIDI 1.0 and MIDI 2.0 based on API, application, and device needs. Much more device metadata available to applications. Better device add/update/remove notifications. Backwards compatibility with our WinMM (MME) MIDI 1.0 API (and WinRT MIDI 1.0 in the future) enabling applications to light up with new features without any changes, and even access MIDI 2.0 devices at a MIDI 1.0 feature level. Open source. The MIDI Service, all its transports, all the tools, the tests, and the SDK are all MIT-licensed open source, and have been developed in concert with hardware and software partners around the world. New USB MIDI 2.0 Class Driver: The new USB MIDI 2.0 Class Driver, graciously provided to Microsoft by AMEI (Association of Musical Electronics Industry of Japan) and written by AmeNote, is a high-speed USB MIDI driver which works with both the new USB MIDI 2.0 devices, as well as with class-compliant USB MIDI 1.0 devices. By default, for compatibility, this is enabled only for USB MIDI 2.0 devices and a handful of USB MIDI 1.0 devices. However, you may manually assign this driver to any class-compliant USB MIDI 1.0 device yourself to gain the better transfer mechanisms. We also have several built-in transports for things that were not previously available without third-party drivers. Learn more about the built-in transports here. Windows MIDI Services App SDK and Tools: Applications using Windows MIDI Services do so through the Windows MIDI Services App SDK, shipped out-of-band. Current preview releases are available on our GitHub repo releases page. Please note that these are unsigned releases and so will give you a warning when you download and install. In addition to installing the required runtime components, the SDK runtime installer includes these tools: Windows MIDI Services Console (midi.exe): The all-around console tool for sending messages, checking the state of MIDI, monitoring incoming messages, sending System Exclusive, and much more. MIDI Diagnostics (mididiag.exe): A tech support tool which provides information about the state of MIDI on the PC. MIDI Kernel Streaming Endpoint Info (midiksinfo.exe): A hardware developer-focused tool which provides information about the KS (Kernel Streaming) endpoints. MIDI multicast dynamic DNS Info (midimdnsinfo.exe): A tool to support the upcoming Network MIDI 2.0 transport. The Windows MIDI Services App SDK also includes the MIDI Settings app – a desktop application for managing endpoints, renaming endpoints and ports, creating loopback devices, managing your network MIDI 2.0 connections, and more. In addition, we’re currently working on our Network MIDI 2.0 transport, recently demonstrated at the NAMM Show in California, the virtual patch-bay to enable routing between endpoints, and a rewrite of our BLE MIDI 1.0 transport. This will all ship in a future version of Windows MIDI Services. We look forward to having Windows Insiders who dabble in music creation try out the Windows MIDI Services Public Preview and MIDI 2.0. Try out using existing applications that use the WinMM MIDI 1.0 function with the new Windows MIDI Services installed. Additionally, any MIDI 1.0 devices with specific IHV drivers. You can also join the discussion here on Discord if you have questions or are looking to help! You will find a list of known issues documented here. Ability to seamlessly resume OneDrive files in 1-click from your phone to PC We are gradually rolling out the ability to seamlessly resume working on OneDrive files from your phone (iOS and Android) on your Windows 11 PC with a single click. With this feature, you will get a notification asking you if you want to pick up where you left off editing a OneDrive file like a Word doc that you last viewed or edited on your phone within a 5-minute time window preceding unlocking your PC. [caption id="attachment_177446" align="alignnone" width="400"] A cross-device resume notification indicating that you can continue working across devices seamlessly.[/caption] Upon clicking on this notification, the same file that you were viewing or editing previously on your phone will open in your default browser on your PC. Here are some important details about how this feature works: This feature works only when signing into OneDrive with a Microsoft account. Work and school accounts are not supported. And you need to be using the same Microsoft account signing into OneDrive on your phone and signing into your Windows 11 PC. This feature supports Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, OneNote notebooks/pages, and PDFs. The OneDrive file must be opened on your phone when your PC is locked. If you then unlock your PC within 5 minutes of accessing the file on your phone, you will receive the resume notification as noted above. For the best experience using this feature, you should be logged into OneDrive in your default browser on your PC. This feature can be managed and turned off via Settings > Apps > Resume. FEEDBACK: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Devices and Drivers -> Linked Phone. Changes and Improvements [File Explorer] When “Restore previous folder windows at logon” is enabled in File Explorer, we will also now restore all the extra tabs which you previously had open in each File Explorer window. As part of this work, we have also updated the logic for the “Automatically save my restartable apps and restart them when I sign back in” setting via Settings > Accounts > Sign in options, so that when you enable this, we will automatically enable the File Explorer specific setting for you too. We’re adding a new option to snooze or turn off the “Start backup” reminder in the File Explorer address bar, for those that aren’t already backing up their Documents, Pictures, or Desktop folders. This option is available when you right-click “Start backup”. [Settings] We are starting to roll out the Settings homepage for commercial customers on PCs managed by an IT administrator. The feature will show some existing cards relevant to enterprise-managed PCs like “Recommended settings” and “Bluetooth devices” as well as two new enterprise-specific device info and accessibility preferences cards. For commercial customers who also use their Microsoft account on their managed PC, there will also be a new accounts card indicating the presence of both work and school and Microsoft account types. We are starting the rollout of this gradually with managed commercial PCs who have both work and school, and Microsoft accounts presently seeing this experience first. [caption id="attachment_177526" align="alignnone" width="621"] The Settings homepage for a commercial customer on a managed PC.[/caption] Fixes [General] Fixed an issue in Build 27783 which was causing multiple surfaces (including the taskbar, search, Settings, and lock screen) to cyclically crash for a small number of Insiders. [Other] Fixed an issue which was causing some Insiders to have a SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION bugcheck in Build 27783. Fixed an issue where the description for virtual NICs wasn’t displayed correctly in ncpa.cpl, it showed garbled characters. Fixed an underlying issue which could cause scanning apps to not detect a scanner, although one was connected. Improved the colors used in MMC when items are selected, both generally, and when contrast modes are enabled. Known issues [General] [IMPORTANT NOTE FOR COPILOT+ PCs] If you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel or retail, you will lose Windows Hello pin and biometrics to sign into your PC with error 0xd0000225 and error message “Something went wrong, and your PIN isn’t available”. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN”. We’re working on the fix for an issue where SFC /scannow is showing errors every time it’s run. [File Explorer] If you open a File Explorer window and minimize it in this build, it may not be rendered correctly when you restore it. [Settings] [NEW] The Home page of Settings may crash. If you are impacted by this, you should still be able to open specific Settings pages directly by searching for them from the taskbar. [Hyper-V] We’re investigating reports where Hyper-V, and other features which rely on Hyper-V (such as WSL) don’t work properly. Microsoft Store Update Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels running version 22501.1401.xx and higher of the Microsoft Store and higher will see the following improvement rolling out: Improving installation options for games: We’re adding a new capability that lets you install individual components for some games. For instance, Call of Duty and Halo can let you install (or not install) high-resolution textures or the campaign. This gives you greater control of your gaming experience and the install size of your games. [caption id="attachment_177615" align="alignnone" width="615"] Example of game components that can be individually installed in the Microsoft Store for some games.[/caption] Once your game is installed, you can return to its product page, click the new Manage button, and modify what components are installed. [caption id="attachment_177616" align="alignnone" width="612"] New Manage button on some game product pages showing components.[/caption] Give it a try and let us know what you think! FEEDBACK: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Microsoft Store. Reminders for Windows Insiders in the Canary Channel The builds we release to the Canary Channel represent the latest platform changes early in the development cycle and should not be seen as matched to any specific release of Windows and features and experiences included in these builds may never get released as we try out different concepts and get feedback. Features may change over time, be removed, or replaced and never get released beyond Windows Insiders. Some of these features and experiences could show up in future Windows releases when they’re ready. Many features in the Canary Channel are rolled out using Control Feature Rollout technology, starting with a subset of Insiders and ramping up over time as we monitor feedback to see how they land before pushing them out to everyone in this channel. Some features may show up in the Dev and Beta Channels first before showing up in the Canary Channel. Some features in active development we preview with Windows Insiders may not be fully localized and localization will happen over time as features are finalized. As you see issues with localization in your language, please report those issues to us via Feedback Hub. To get off the Canary Channel, a clean install of Windows 11 will be required. As a reminder - Insiders can’t switch to a channel that is receiving builds with lower build numbers without doing a clean installation of Windows 11 due to technical setup requirements. The desktop watermark shown at the lower right corner of the desktop is normal for these pre-release builds. Check out Flight Hub for a complete look at what build is in which Insider channel. Thanks, Amanda & BrandonView the full article

Starting with Microsoft Edge 134 (and Chrome 134), we're happy to announce the availability of a new HTML meta tag, <meta name="application-title">, which allows developers to control the text that appears in the title bar of their installed applications. When developing a web application, giving your users a good experience is important. Across the various parts of your application's user interface, there will be many opportunities to fine-tune the experience and make it feel more polished. For installed web applications though, one of these opportunities lies in the title bar. The title bar of an app is usually represented as a horizontal bar that sits at the top of the window, and which contains the name of the application and the window control buttons. Sometimes, depending on the application, the title bar can also include contextual information, such as the name of an opened document for example. On the web platform, several options are available to you to control the information that's included in the title bar. In fact, in a previous post, we had covered how you can even hide the entire title bar and create your own custom UI by using the Window Controls Overlay API. But, if you choose to retain the default title bar, that UI element displays the text that comes from the page's <title> HTML element, which can sometimes be a problem. Indeed, the same <title> HTML element is what controls the text that's displayed in a browser tab, when your app is not installed. Developers generally use the <title> HTML element to put various pieces of contextual information about the state of their app. This can be, for instance, the number of unread messages, the name of the open document, or any other information about the state of the app. In addition, it's common for developers to add the name of their app in the <title>. As an example, a TODO list application called TODO app might define an HTML title like: My personal list - 4 tasks to do - 2 tasks done | TODO app When that same TODO list app is installed, it gets its own app window, and therefore, its own title bar. On Windows, the title bar of an installed web application always starts with the name of the app, taken from the manifest file, followed by a dash, and then followed by the contents of the HTML <title> element. Taking the previous example again, once the app is installed, the following title bar content would appear: TODO app - My personal list - 4 tasks to do - 2 tasks done | TODO app The repetition of the app's name is problematic here. Additionally, a browser tab and an installed application title bar are different UIs that serve different purposes, and we know that developers usually want to display different text content for when their app is displayed in a browser tab vs. when it's installed. This is why we implemented <meta name="application-title">, a new HTML meta tag which lets you control your installed application title bar content. Taking the TODO list application example one more time, setting the title bar content to "TODO app - My personal list" can be achieved with this HTML code: <meta name='application-title' content='My personal list'>. With the new application-title meta tag, you can now progressively enhance your web app's UX by displaying the appropriate text content whether it's installed as a standalone app or running in a tab, all without having to use JavaScript to dynamically change the app's name. This functionality is available in Microsoft Edge starting with version 134 (and in other Chromium-based browsers). To learn more, see application-title on MDN and visit our sample application with a supporting browser (source code). If you have any feedback, please share it with our team by going to Settings and more (...) > Help and feedback > Send feedback in Edge.View the full article

In this post, we're announcing, and requesting feedback on a new proposal to extend the Notifications API to allow web apps to send incoming call notifications. Web applications have been able to alert users via notifications for about a decade now. By using the Notifications API, a web app can display messages in the operating system's built-in notification center. When used well, notifications can be a powerful tool to keep users informed about important events. This ability to integrate deeply within the operating system has been a key factor in making the web platform relevant for a wide range of application use cases. However, there are always more use cases to unlock. One such case is for applications that want to notify their users of incoming calls. If the application you're working on allows for audio and/or video calls to be made, you might have found the Notifications API to be not enough for your needs. Indeed, the API doesn't currently let you customize the buttons that appear inside of a notification, or make the notification higher priority than others, or associate a ringtone with it. You might even have needed to implement your own custom incoming call notification mechanism. We think this is a limitation we can solve. Extending the Notifications API to support incoming calls In our Incoming Call Notifications explainer, we’re proposing an extension to the Notifications API to solve this problem. We’ve also implemented a prototype of this explainer in Chromium. This new API extension proposal lets you create notifications that: Are visually distinguished from other notifications. Have customized buttons, which can be used to answer or reject a call. Have a ringtone associated with them. And have a higher priority than other notifications, when supported by the platform. The explainer introduces a new optional parameter you can pass when showing a notification. The existing options parameter will now accept a new scenario property, which can be set to "incoming-call" to indicate that this notification is an incoming call notification: With the above code, the notification makes it clear that this is an incoming call and lets the user easily start or reject the call. The API extension also makes it possible to add your own custom buttons alongside the dismiss button, for example to accept the call with audio only: Test the feature To see the API in action, use our sample app in Microsoft Edge on Windows by using the following steps: Start Microsoft Edge on Windows from the command line with the following feature flag: msedge.exe --enable-features=IncomingCallNotifications. Open the calls notification sample app. Install the app on Windows, by clicking the App available button in the address bar. When the app is installed and running, click the Permission button to accept notifications from the sample app. Click the Show an incoming call notification button. Let us know what you think We're very excited about the use cases this proposal can unlock for web apps, and about how this can help developers continue to leverage the web platform when building powerful applications. We're looking for feedback on this proposal, so if you’re interested in this API and want to help us shape it, please read the explainer, and send us your feedback by opening a new issue on our repository. There’s always more work to do to help web developers achieve their goals on the web platform, for example, how would the Incoming Call Notifications API integrate with urgent Push messages? We’re always looking for new problem spaces like this, new use cases, and new ideas. So, even if your feedback isn’t related to the Incoming Calls Notification API, please do reach out.View the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4870 (KB5050087) to the Beta Channel. Please note this build will only be provided to Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel who did not upgrade to receiving updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2. Changes in Beta Channel builds and updates are documented in two buckets: new features, improvements, and fixes that are being gradually rolled out for Insiders who have turned on the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available (via Settings > Windows Update*) and then new features, improvements, and fixes rolling out to everyone in the Beta Channel. For more information, see the Reminders section at the bottom of this blog post. New features gradually being rolled out to the Beta Channel with toggle on* Choose what Lock screen widgets appear We’re beginning to roll out support for lock screen widgets (previously referred to as “Weather and more”) to Windows Insiders in the European Economic Area (EEA). You can add, remove, and rearrange lock screen widgets such as Weather, Watchlist, Sports, Traffic, and more. Any widget that supports the small sizing option can be added here. To customize your lock screen widgets, navigate to Settings > Personalization > Lock screen. We are starting this rollout first with Insiders in the EEA and plan to expand to Insiders in other regions in the future. Insiders outside the EEA will continue to see the “Weather and more” experience. [caption id="attachment_177608" align="alignnone" width="600"] Customization settings for lock screen widgets shown in Settings.[/caption] As part of this, we’re also adding support for a new group policy called “Disable Widgets On Lock Screen” that will allow IT administrators to disable lock screen widgets without disabling widgets elsewhere on PCs they manage. To edit this policy, please launch the Local Group Policy Editor app and navigate to Computer Configurations > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Widgets. This policy is only supported in EEA regions at this time but will expand to include other regions in the future as well. FEEDBACK: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Desktop Environment > Lock screen. Changes and Improvements gradually being rolled out to the Beta Channel with toggle on* [File Explorer] For Windows Insiders signed in with a work or school account (Entra ID), File Explorer will begin showing people icons under the “Activity” column on File Explorer Home and on “Recommended” at the top of File Explorer Home. When you hover or click over a people icon, it will display the Live Persona Card for that person from Microsoft 365. [caption id="attachment_177609" align="alignnone" width="437"] Activity column under File Explorer Home showing people icons highlighted in a red box.[/caption] Fixes gradually being rolled out to the Beta Channel with toggle on* [Start menu] Fixed an issue causing Start menu to crash for some Insiders when interacting with the letters in the apps list. Fixed an issue where the colors were not correct when opening the account manager flyout on the when using a mixed dark and light custom mode in Settings > Personalization > Colors. [File Explorer] Fixed an issue where if you opened a File Explorer window and minimized it, it might not be rendered correctly when you restored it. Fixed an issue which was impacting File Explorer reliability for some Insiders. Fixed an issue which was causing explorer.exe to crash when dropping files into File Explorer sometimes in the latest flights. [Other] Fixed a high hitting background sihost.exe crash in the latest flights. Fixes for everyone in the Beta Channel [Other] This update includes fixes for the following issues: [USB cameras] Fixed: Your device does not recognize the camera is on. This issue occurs after you install the January 2025 security update. [USB audio device drivers] Fixed: The code 10 error message, “This device cannot start” appears. This occurs when you connect to certain external audio management devices. Known issues [File Explorer] We’re investigating an issue causing File Explorer to be very slow to close for some Insiders when closing using the X button. This may also impact the other title bar buttons. [Settings] The Home page of Settings may crash. If you are impacted by this, you should still be able to open specific Settings pages directly by searching for them from the taskbar. There is a known issue where the two new enterprise-specific device info and accessibility preferences cards are showing up on non-managed PCs signed in with Microsoft accounts. Reminders for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel will receive updates based on Windows 11, version 23H2 via an enablement package (Build 22635.xxxx). Many features in the Beta Channel are rolled out using Control Feature Rollout technology, starting with a subset of Insiders and ramping up over time as we monitor feedback to see how they land before pushing them out to everyone in this channel. For Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel who want to be the first to get features gradually rolled out to you, you can turn ON the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available via Settings > Windows Update*. Over time, we will increase the rollouts of features to everyone with the toggle turned on. Should you keep this toggle off, new features will gradually be rolled out to your PC over time once they are ready. Features and experiences included in these builds may never get released as we try out different concepts and get feedback. Features may change over time, be removed, or replaced and never get released beyond Windows Insiders. Some of these features and experiences could show up in future Windows releases when they’re ready. Some features in active development we preview with Windows Insiders may not be fully localized and localization will happen over time as features are finalized. As you see issues with localization in your language, please report those issues to us via Feedback Hub. Because the Dev and Beta Channels represent parallel development paths from our engineers, there may be cases where features and experiences show up in the Beta Channel first. Check out Flight Hub for a complete look at what build is in which Insider channel. Thanks, Amanda & BrandonView the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.3073 (KB5050090) to the Dev Channel. With this update, we are previewing the ability to use improved Windows Search to find files saved in your OneDrive with Windows Insiders with Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs. We also have a small Paint update rolling out (see below). Starting today, we are beginning to offer the same Dev Channel updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2 to Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel. These updates will be optional at first, so if you are in the Beta Channel today, you can upgrade when you are ready to do so. [caption id="attachment_177574" align="alignnone" width="711"] Optional Windows 11, version 24H2 update offers in Windows Update for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel highlighted in a red box.[/caption] We plan to make these updates recommended later this year, which means you will eventually get upgraded to 24H2-based updates automatically if you are in the Beta Channel. Until that happens, the Beta Channel will continue to receive both updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2 AND Windows 11, version 23H2 (but sometimes not at the same time). Please note that if you choose to upgrade to receiving updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2 in the Beta Channel, you may lose some feature rollouts. If you are an Insider in the Dev Channel, you now have a window to switch from the Dev Channel to the Beta Channel if you would like. This window will only be open for as long as we’re releasing the same 24H2-based updates across both the Dev and Beta Channels. By the end of February, the Dev Channel will jump ahead to receiving updates with higher build numbers and once this happens, the opportunity to switch between these channels will close. When the Dev Channel jumps ahead, things might not be as stable as the Dev Channel is today, so we highly encourage you to evaluate which channel you would like to be in during the time in which the window to switch is open. New Copilot+ PC experiences Find photos saved in the cloud with improved Windows Search A few weeks ago, we began previewing improved Windows Search with Windows Insiders on Copilot+ PCs. In that first preview, we introduced semantic indexing along with traditional lexical indexing for finding files saved locally in indexed locations on Copilot+ PCs with 40+ TOPS NPU onboard. Today, we are excited to announce support for also finding photos saved in the cloud with improved Windows Search. Just use your own words to find photos stored and saved in the cloud by describing what they are about like “European castles” or “summer picnics” in the search box at the top right corner of File Explorer. In addition to photos stored locally on your Copilot+ PC, photos from the cloud will now show up in the search results together. In addition to searching for photos, exact matches for your keywords within the text of your cloud files will show in the search results. [caption id="attachment_177578" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Results including mountain bike photos one from the cloud in File Explorer with improved Windows Search.[/caption] Finding photos saved in the cloud currently works when searching within File Explorer directly. This will also work directly from the Windows search box on the taskbar in a future flight. You can try this experience out today with your personal OneDrive when signed in with your Microsoft account and connected to the internet. If you are signed into OneDrive with a work or school account (Entra ID), you will only see matches for keywords you are searching for within the text of your cloud files in the search results – not photos. Third-party cloud providers will be able to support this experience with their services as well with documentation coming soon. We're excited to introduce a new way to find your cloud content in Windows and will continue improving search results and capabilities over time. These improved Windows Search experiences continue to gradually roll out to Windows Insiders on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, including finding photos saved in the cloud, so you may not see these experiences right away. Support for AMD and Intel-powered Copilot+ PCs is coming soon. See here for more details. You can learn more about semantic search on Copilot + PCs here. FEEDBACK for File Explorer Search: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Files Folders and Online Storage > File Explorer Search. Other changes that are included in this Dev and Beta Channel update This update (Build 26120.3073) includes other changes and improvements available to Windows Insiders across all Windows 11 PCs in addition to the features noted above that are exclusive to Copilot+ PCs. These changes are documented below in two buckets: New features, improvements, and fixes that are being gradually rolled out for Insiders who have turned on the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available (via Settings > Windows Update*). New features, improvements, and fixes rolling out to everyone in the Dev Channel. For more information, see the Reminders section at the bottom of this blog post. Changes and Improvements gradually being rolled out to the Dev Channel with toggle on* [Settings] We are starting to roll out the Settings homepage for commercial customers on PCs managed by an IT administrator. The feature will show some existing cards relevant to enterprise-managed PCs like “Recommended settings” and “Bluetooth devices” as well as two new enterprise-specific device info and accessibility preferences cards. For commercial customers who also use their Microsoft account on their managed PC, there will also be a new accounts card indicating the presence of both work and school and Microsoft account types. We are starting the rollout of this gradually with managed commercial PCs who have both work and school, and Microsoft accounts presently seeing this experience first. [caption id="attachment_177526" align="alignnone" width="649"] The Settings homepage for a commercial customer on a managed PC.[/caption] Fixes gradually being rolled out to the Dev Channel with toggle on* [Taskbar & System Tray] Fixed an issue which was causing the taskbar preview windows to not display sometimes when hovering over open apps in the taskbar. [File Explorer] We did some work to help address an issue where File Explorer might hang when browsing a folder with lots of media in it. Fixed an issue where if you opened a File Explorer window and minimized it in, it might not be rendered correctly when you restored it. [Improved Windows Search] Fixed the issue where in some rare cases, searching on Outlook while offline might result in some results not being found. [Live Captions] Fixed an issue where live captions might show an icon in the taskbar, but the window wouldn’t display on the screen, after disconnecting a second monitor. [Remote Desktop] Fixed an issue which was causing Remote Desktop to show significant display / rendering issues when connecting to certain other computers. [Settings] Fixed an issue which was causing Settings to crash when interacting with the Bluetooth & Devices page sometimes. [Other] Fixed an issue where when using GDI+ to shrink an image, the colors may be wrong afterwards.. Fixed an issue which could cause shutdown to be noticeably slower on certain devices when a controller was connected. Fixed an underlying issue causing the Windows Security pop up when signing into certain Wi-Fi networks to not be interactable. This may have also impacted interacting with this pop up for certain other options in Settings. Fixed an issue where the description for virtual NICs wasn’t displayed correctly in ncpa.cpl, it showed garbled characters. Fixes for everyone in the Dev Channel [General] We fixed the issue causing a 0xc0e90001 error to occur when booting into Windows Recovery (WinRE) on Arm64 PCs. [Other] [Memory leak] Fixed: Leaks occur when predictive input ideas show. [High dynamic range (HDR)] Fixed: The display of some games appears oversaturated. This occurs when you use Auto HDR. [Remote Desktop Gateway] Fixed: You get errors or cannot sign when you connect to Windows 11 workstations. This occurs when you enforce device redirection. [USB audio device drivers] Fixed: The code 10 error message, “This device cannot start” appears. This occurs when you connect to certain external audio management devices. Known issues [General] After you do a PC reset under Settings > System > Recovery, your build version may incorrectly show as Build 26100 instead of Build 26120. This will not prevent you from getting future Dev Channel updates which will resolve this issue. [NEW] We're investigating an issue causing unexpectedly high DCOM CPU usage for some Insiders after opening the Performance section of Task Manager [Recall] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: Recall can be enabled or disabled from “Turn Windows features on or off”. We are caching the Recall binaries on disk while we test add/remove. In a future update we will completely remove the binaries. Some users may see a message to “Make sure Recall is saving snapshots”, while the Settings page for Recall shows saving snapshots is enabled. Reboot your device to resolve this issue. Make sure you update Microsoft 365 apps to the latest version so you can jump back into specific documents. [Click to Do] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: Sometimes additional context is given when using more intelligent text actions powered by Phi Silica. The intelligent text actions leverage the power of Microsoft’s secure cloud to improve your text results by ensuring prompts and responses are safe and appropriate. This data is automatically deleted. Local moderation to ensure the safety of prompts and responses will be added in the future, replacing this cloud endpoint. If any of your actions on image entities are no longer appearing, please ensure you have the latest updates for the Photos and Paint app from the Microsoft Store. [Live captions & real-time translation] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: Some Insiders may see a crash on first launch of live captions. Restart live captions if you encounter this issue and you will not see it again. If audio is playing or the microphone is enabled, switching languages will crash live captions. Stop audio when changing languages to resume captions or translations. [Improved Windows Search] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: [NEW] The AI sparkle and underline animation in the File Explorer search box is not present in this build even when improved Windows Search is in use on your Copilot+ PC. If your search results are powered by improved Windows Search, you will see a notice at the bottom of File Explorer stating, “Search uses AI to find results” and directing you to file feedback if something doesn’t look right. In this build, the search box on the taskbar does not yet have the same underline and sparkles icon UI that the File Explorer search box has. This is coming in a future flight. In some rare cases, improved Windows search experiences may not be available and may require a reboot to start working. In some rare cases, File explorer search might be unresponsive and may require a reboot to start working. The tip about the new search improvements appears whenever you set focus to the search box in File Explorer, rather than only once. [File Explorer] We’re investigating an issue causing File Explorer to be very slow to close for some Insiders when closing using the X button. This may also have an impact on the other title bar buttons. [Power and Battery] [NEW] The colors in the new battery icon aren’t displaying correctly when you have your mode in Personalization > Colors set to certain options with Custom. [Settings] [NEW] The Home page of Settings may crash. If you are impacted by this, you should still be able to open specific Settings pages directly by searching for them from the taskbar. Paint Update We are rolling out an update for Paint (version 11.2412.271.0 and higher) to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels. In this update, we are introducing the Copilot menu to Paint where you can access all the intelligent features which help you complete your image generation and editing tasks faster. Clicking on the Copilot icon from the toolbar will expand into a drop-down menu where you can easily access the features Cocreator, Image Creator, Generative erase, and Remove background. Note that Cocreator is only available on Copilot+ PCs. Within the dropdown, each feature will also include a short description to help you choose the right tool. [caption id="attachment_177577" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Paint Copilot menu opened.[/caption] FEEDBACK: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Apps > Paint. Reminders for Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel receive updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2 via an enablement package (Build 26120.xxxx). Updates delivered to the Dev Channel are in a format that offers a preview of enhancements to servicing technology on Windows 11, version 24H2. To learn more, see https://aka.ms/CheckpointCumulativeUpdates. Many features in the Dev Channel are rolled out using Control Feature Rollout technology, starting with a subset of Insiders and ramping up over time as we monitor feedback to see how they land before pushing them out to everyone in this channel. For Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel who want to be the first to get features gradually rolled out to you, you can turn ON the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available via Settings > Windows Update*. Over time, we will increase the rollouts of features to everyone with the toggle turned on. Should you keep this toggle off, new features will gradually be rolled out to your PC over time once they are ready. Features and experiences included in these builds may never get released as we try out different concepts and get feedback. Features may change over time, be removed, or replaced and never get released beyond Windows Insiders. Some of these features and experiences could show up in future Windows releases when they’re ready. Some features in active development we preview with Windows Insiders may not be fully localized and localization will happen over time as features are finalized. As you see issues with localization in your language, please report those issues to us via Feedback Hub. Please note that some accessibility features may not work with features like Recall and Click to Do while in preview with Windows Insiders. Because the Dev and Beta Channels represent parallel development paths from our engineers, there may be cases where features and experiences show up in the Beta Channel first. Check out Flight Hub for a complete look at what build is in which Insider channel. Thanks, Amanda & BrandonView the full article

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, a sequel to 2022’s Citizen Sleeper, is now available. “You don’t necessarily need to have played the first game, but it does help in understanding the nuance and complexities of the unforgiving, dystopian world that Citizen Sleeper is set in,” writes Xbox Wire’s Danielle Partis. “While the first game often felt like an isolated journey where helping yourself was often a zero-sum game, Citizen Sleeper 2 introduces a crew system, alongside some other clever new features, allowing your Sleeper to become the quirky, unappointed protagonist of your very own episodic sci-fi adventure.” In this role-playing game, you are a sleeper – a human mind housed in an artificial body, a fugitive from your makers and people who want to control you. Your future is yours to navigate, from commandeering a ship to building a network of allies and/or crew to executing contracts. Read more about it on Xbox Wire.View the full article

In today's digital age, browser users spend significant time reading content online. The contrast ratio between the text and its background is therefore very important to ensure comfort and to reduce eye strain. That's why, based on your feedback, we had already enhanced text rendering in Microsoft Edge back in 2021. Today, we're taking things one step further and we're happy to announce that our enhanced text rendering is now available for users across all Chromium-based browsers on Windows. For Google Chrome specifically, enhanced text contrast is available on Windows starting with Chrome version 132. What's new We have brought our contrast enhancement and gamma correction improvements to the Chromium open-source project. This way, the quality and clarity of the text that's displayed in all browsers that are based on Chromium now match that of other native Windows applications. To give you a better understanding of the improvement, here are a few different text contrast comparisons. We experimented with text rendering at various contrast values, comparing them to the current 0.5 contrast value. The screenshot below demonstrates that increasing the contrast value to 1.0 significantly enhances text visibility, particularly in scenarios involving lighter-weight text and CJK languages, which we heard a lot of feedback about. Customize contrast and gamma values On Windows, you are always in control of how text is rendered. Use the ClearType Text Tuner to test and configure different contrast and gamma values. Open the Start menu and search for Adjust ClearType text. With the text contrast enhancement we made to Chromium, the Windows ClearType Text Tuner now also applies to the browser. Technical background To give some context as to why this change was made, we need to look at how Microsoft Edge used to render text before we adopted the Chromium project. In these older versions, Microsoft Edge used DirectWrite to render text, which ensured consistent system-wide settings across Windows applications. In contrast, Chromium uses DirectWrite only for some parts of the text-rendering pipeline, using Skia, its own text shaping and rendering system, for the rest. This led to lighter text rendering in Chromium, especially noticeable in CJK characters. Let us know your feedback As always, your comments and suggestions are invaluable as we continue to enhance text rendering on the web. If you notice an issue with text contrast on Windows, in a Chromium browser, please open the issue on the Chromium bug tracker. Additionally, you can send us feedback via the Microsoft Edge feedback window by going to Settings and more (…) > Help and feedback > Send feedback.View the full article

In Avowed, the immersive fantasy role-playing game from Obsidian launching on Feb. 18, players have more freedom than ever before in quests, character interactions and combat. Xbox Wire’s Mike Nelson spoke with the team behind the title to explore the philosophy behind that level of agency. “Everywhere I looked was an opportunity to engage with this world, either through circumnavigating old houses to find loot, or talking to locals that would yield side quests — and this was all before I even stepped foot outside of the port city of Paradis,” he writes. Personal choices have deep consequences for individual characters, who react and respond to how players play side and main story quests. Read more of his insights on Xbox Wire.View the full article

As organizations look to the future, accessing and unlocking value through both the cloud and endpoints will become a cornerstone of every AI strategy. Combining the scalability of cloud compute with the efficiency of local AI compute through powerful Neural Processing Units (NPU) with a groundbreaking new category of PCs: Copilot+ PCs. These devices are built to deliver unparalleled performance and intelligence. Today, we are excited to announce the latest additions to our Surface for Business Copilot+ PC family: Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, now available with the latest Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2). Starting Feb. 18, business customers can choose between Intel and Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs from Surface, and experience the most advanced, intelligent and secure PCs available across both platforms. In response to one of our top customer requests to provide more cellular connectivity options for mobile work, we are thrilled to share that for the first time, 5G will be coming to Surface Laptop for Business, available later in 2025[i]. This laptop has been redesigned from the ground up to exceed our customers' expectations for a connected Windows 11 Copilot+ PC and is also equipped with Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2). To round out our business offerings, we are also excited to introduce the new Surface USB4 Dock, new experiences with Microsoft Teams Rooms on Surface Hub 3 and the public preview of Security Copilot in the Surface Management Portal. https://youtu.be/9SWEA2y2DjQ New Surface Copilot+ PCs for Business Customers are choosing Surface Copilot+ PCs today for the best in performance, battery life and security. Paired with Microsoft 365 Copilot[ii] and enhanced AI processing power, these devices transform the employee experience to amplify your team’s efficiency and creativity through Copilot+ PC experiences designed for work. "At CES, we showcased Copilot+ PCs powered by Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2) and partnered with Microsoft to ensure that it delivers exceptional performance, longer battery life and cutting-edge security for the Windows ecosystem. We're excited to introduce new Surface for Business Copilot+ PCs and provide businesses with a wider range of AI-powered devices to enhance efficiency and productivity. Our partnership will continue to drive momentum in the category.” Jim Johnson, Senior Vice President and Interim General Manager of Intel's Client Computing Group Surface Laptop for Business with Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2) Available starting Feb. 18, 2025, starting at $1,499.99 (MSRP) Customers choose Surface Laptop because it redefines the premium PC built for work, combining a sleek modern design with incredible performance and industry-leading security. It’s designed to strike the perfect balance between power and portability, maximizing productivity while being a device that employees are proud to carry and use. The new Surface Laptop for Business is built with the latest Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2), an incredible battery that lasts up to 22 hours[iii], anti-reflective displays with ultra-thin bezels, Wi-Fi 7[iv], more ports and an optional smart card reader[v]. Available in two sizes, the 13.8-inch display offers a larger viewing area than traditional 14-inch screens within a more compact frame, while the 15-inch version provides even more viewing space while remaining easy to carry. This thin and compact design delivers on the critical fundamentals that businesses rely on. When compared to Surface Laptop 5, the new Surface Laptop delivers up to 26% faster performance for multi-tasking[vi], up to 2x faster graphics performance[vii], up to 3x the battery life when on Teams calls[viii] and can easily power new AI-powered experiences through the NPU. The keyboard on Surface Laptop provides an exceptional typing experience, perfected for comfort, speed and sound with every keystroke. The large precision haptic touchpad delivers realistic feedback when tapped or clicked. Designed for inclusivity, the touchpad allows users to easily adjust pressure sensitivity and use intuitive touch gestures for easier navigation. Advancements in laptop design support our customers’ sustainability goals, a critical factor when equipping a large workforce with new devices. The new Surface Laptop contains more recycled content than any other Surface device including 100% recycled rare earth metals in the magnets[ix] and featuring our first ever battery cell to make use of 100% recycled cobalt[x]. For the first time ever, we’re adding cellular connectivity to our Surface Laptop lineup. Surface Laptop 5G will be available later in 2025, enabling your team to work comfortably and productively from virtually anywhere. We’ll share more details on Surface Laptop 5G in the coming months. The new Surface Laptop is a true business machine, designed to meet the needs of modern professionals and enhance productivity in any work environment. Surface Pro for Business with Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2) Available starting Feb. 18, 2025, starting at $1,499.99 (MSRP) Surface Pro is the go-to device for customers that are looking for a device that can do it all, offering powerful performance, incredible versatility and enterprise-grade security from Microsoft. It quickly adapts to your team’s needs, whether that is typing a report with a Surface Pro Keyboard[xi], taking notes with the Surface Slim Pen[xi] or using the AI-powered ultrawide camera to keep you in frame on Teams calls. With the versatile design of Surface Pro, it can replace the need to use a tablet and a laptop with one device that can give you the best of both. The new Surface Pro is built with the latest Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2), delivers up to 28% more performance[xii], up to 98% more graphics performance[vii] and up to 2x the battery life during Teams calls[xiii] compared to Surface Pro 9. It also features enhanced local AI processing power with an NPU to amplify your team’s intelligence, efficiency and creativity through Copilot+ PC experiences designed for work. When paired with the Surface Pro Flex Keyboard[xi], Surface Pro transforms into a highly versatile Windows laptop. The keyboard can be used either attached or wirelessly, allowing users to adapt quickly and work efficiently in any environment, from the office to an airplane or train seat. This flexibility enables users to have a comfortable and premium typing experience that enhances productivity wherever they work. The 13-inch PixelSense display extends the versatility of Surface Pro even further. It’s designed to be used easily with touch and pen input as a tablet or a laptop, and the anti-reflective and adaptive color technology helps users to clearly see the content on the screen in almost any lighting environment and reduces reflections by up to 50%. The new optional OLED display delivers new levels of peak brightness and immersive colors that improve readability in even fluorescent office lighting environments or even in direct sunlight. Surface Pro also offers versatile and secure sign-in options. Customers can sign in with facial recognition with the built-in Windows Hello Camera or the built-in NFC reader with security keys like the YubiKey 5C NFC to securely get to work without using a password. Surface Pro is also certified for use with Imprivata Enterprise Access Management (EAM), enabling healthcare providers to tap their NFC-enabled badge or security key to quickly sign in and out. This enhances healthcare workflows and safeguards patient data by logging users off instantly, reduces errors by preventing clinicians from charting under the wrong profile, and increases productivity by providing fast and secure user switching. Across industries – from retail to education – our customers call out the importance of sustainability in making device purchases, and Surface Pro is designed with those goals in mind. The enclosure is made with a minimum of 89% recycled content, including 100% recycled aluminum alloy and 100% recycled rare earth metals[xiv]. It is also designed for serviceability, with replaceable components such as the motherboard, battery, cameras and a removable SSD that can be accessed through an easy-to-open door behind the kickstand[xv]. Surface Pro is the perfect device for on the go productivity, delivering lightning-fast performance, AI-accelerated power, all in a thin, light and versatile package. Secure by design and by default In line with Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative commitment, security is our top priority, and we’re intently focused on designing our products to be secure by design and by default. We continually raise the bar to deliver robust defense against the evolving threat landscape for both our customers and the entire Windows ecosystem. Windows 11, our most secure operating system yet, dramatically reduces exposure to attack by enabling advanced security tools and technologies by design and by default. This protects against phishing, malware, ransomware and other evolving threats. Beyond Windows, every layer of a Surface device, from the hardware to the cloud is maintained and protected by Microsoft. This gives customers ultimate control, proactive protection and peace of mind wherever and however they work. Our team constantly thinks about how malicious actors could threaten your business and seamlessly ensures you always have the latest through Windows Update, ensuring you and your teams remain protected and secure. Copilot+ PCs are the most secure Windows PCs ever, with the Microsoft Pluton security processor enabled by default on all Copilot+ PCs. Pluton, a chip-to-cloud security technology designed by Microsoft and embedded by silicon partners directly into the CPU, ensures Zero Trust principles at the core. This design helps protect sensitive information such as passwords, user identities and encryption keys from potential attacks. It acts as a secure vault within the computer, ensuring that even if someone gains physical access to the device, they cannot easily steal critical data. Pluton receives regular updates directly from Microsoft, ensuring it always has the latest security features and protections against evolving threats. Microsoft is also working across the Windows ecosystem to update the capabilities of Pluton by introducing the Key Storage Provider (KSP) on Intel Core Ultra (Series 2), Snapdragon X Series and AMD Ryzen AI 300 series processors. This will allow for more secure storage and management of cryptographic keys, further strengthening the overall security of the device, and we’ll share more details on this in the coming months. This comprehensive approach ensures every layer of a Surface device is protected, providing a seamless and secure experience for users and peace of mind for IT professionals. Learn more about what’s new with Microsoft Pluton on the Windows IT Pro Blog. Unlocking AI productivity with Windows These great new Surface Copilot+ PCs are part of an expanding ecosystem of Windows commercial solutions that serve every job, in every organization. We’re listening to our customers and providing them with more choice so that they can find a Copilot+ PC that fits every need. At Ignite, we introduced several AI features that enhance workflows, and boost communication and collaboration by tapping into the NPU on Copilot+ PCs. One of these new experiences is the new and improved Windows Search experience[xvi]. It allows users to find files using associated words and phrases, without needing to remember exact file names or content for both local and active OneDrive for Business files. For example, users can find a document about sustainability by searching for “green presentation.” They can also search images based on their content, including text found in an image. Removing the need for precise keyword matching in file names or content can save valuable time, enabling users to intuitively search for files, information or settings in the ways that they can easily remember. Windows, combined with Microsoft 365 and Surface devices, provides a powerful platform for businesses to securely boost productivity, simplify workflows and enhance collaboration. With tools like Windows Autopatch, Autopilot in Intune, and Windows Backup and Hotpatch, deploying and managing these new PCs securely has never been easier. New Security Copilot in Surface Management Portal (Preview) Available in public preview starting Feb. 24, 2025 https://youtu.be/2WvJXDNxBbU Streamline the management of Surface devices within your organization with the Surface Management Portal in Microsoft Intune. This powerful tool provides IT admins with a centralized platform to monitor, manage and secure all Surface devices, ensuring they are always up-to-date and performing optimally. Capabilities like device health monitoring, warranty and servicing management help businesses maintain a secure and efficient IT environment, reducing downtime and enhancing productivity of their employees. We are excited to share that later this month, customers will have access to Security Copilot in the Surface Management Portal. Copilot provides the power of generative AI in Intune to simplify and enhance the device management experience for IT admins. With Copilot, IT admins can quickly search for and resolve specific device issues, summarize warranty information, and access support tickets and service orders related to their organization’s Surface devices. This reduces the time and effort needed for routine maintenance tasks, creating more time to focus on other initiatives. In addition, Copilot pulls contextually relevant data from your Intune-enrolled Surface devices along with public information into a single view, streamlining the management process and enhancing overall efficiency. We've been in private preview with a select group of customers, allowing us to gather critical feedback and insights that have shaped the current experience. Starting Feb. 24, customers can join the public preview, and the insights and learnings we’ll gain can help us shape the future of the Surface Management Portal. Learn more about Security Copilot in Surface Management Portal on the Surface IT Pro Blog. New Surface USB4 Dock Available starting Feb. 18, 2025, at $199.99 (MSRP) Enhance your team’s workspace with the new Surface USB4 Dock, the essential dock for productivity and connectivity. Connect and power devices like the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with accessories via two USB-C, one USB-A, Ethernet and HDMI ports. This new dock delivers fast charging with the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with up to 65W power passthrough and enables fast data transfer of up to 40 Gbps. Dual 4K monitor support, via USB-C or HDMI transforms your workspace into a three-screen powerhouse. New Surface Hub 3 experiences Surface Hub 3 is the first-party Teams Rooms touch board. We’ve brought iconic Surface design together with the inclusive and collaborative Teams Rooms experiences that define the meeting space. It’s helped our customers create a consistent experience across Hub and other conference rooms and collaborative spaces, for both the teams meeting in those spaces and the IT administrators managing the technology. Now, we’re partnering with Teams to bring new experiences to Surface Hub 3. Microsoft Edge on Surface Hub 3 will offer seamless access to websites, third-party web apps and personal content[xvii], with an easy-to-use home screen button for walk-up browsing. Edge will run in Kiosk Mode for privacy and security, and Edge sessions can be shared into Teams meetings.[xviii] General availability for Edge on Hub 3 is targeting Q3 2025. Employees want the option to share content however is best for them – so we’re also adding Miracast support to Teams Rooms on Windows devices. Miracast makes it possible to wirelessly project content from a Surface PC to Surface Hub 3. Learn more about the new experiences coming to Surface Hub 3 on the Surface IT Pro Blog. Order today With Windows 10 End-of-Support upcoming on Oct. 14, 2025, now is the time to transition your fleet from Windows 10 to Windows 11 with confidence. After providing 10 years of updates and support, Windows 10 PCs will no longer receive security or feature updates. Our focus is to help businesses and their employees stay protected and more productive by moving to Windows 11 PCs. Surface Copilot+ PCs are the ideal choice to modernize your business. They offer a powerful combination of hardware, software and unparalleled security, to support your business needs while future-proofing to take advantage of new Copilot+ PC experiences being released in the future. As you trial and deploy Copilot+ PCs in your environment, consider Surface as your partner to unlock exclusive AI features to help drive bottom-line business results. With options for both Intel and Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, Surface provides the flexibility to meet your specific business requirements. Order your Surface Copilot+ PCs today and experience the future of business productivity. Visit Surface.com/Business to learn more, find a partner or order the new Surface Pro and new Surface Laptop directly from the Microsoft Store. When shopping at Microsoft.com, customers can take advantage of free shipping and an extended 60-day price protection and return window. Footnotes: [i] Surface Laptop with 5G will be available later in 2025 and not available in all areas. eSIM and 5G support are also not available in all areas; compatibility and performance depend on carrier network, plan and other factors. See carrier for details and pricing [ii] Copilot for Microsoft 365 sold separately and requires a qualifying volume license or subscription. Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 | Microsoft 365. [iii] Up to 22 hours of battery life based on local video playback test on Surface Laptop 15-inch, 7th Edition with Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2). Based on local video playback test. Testing conducted by Microsoft in January 2025 using preproduction software and preproduction Surface Laptop 13.8-inch Intel Core Ultra 5 256GB, 16GB RAM devices and Surface Laptop 15-inch Intel Core Ultra 7 256GB, 16GB RAM devices. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during video playback of a .mov file through the Windows Media Player application in 1080p at 24 FPS. All settings were default except screen brightness set to 150 nits with Auto-brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors. [iv] 6GHz band not available in all regions. [v] Integrated smart card reader available only on Surface Laptop 15-inch, 7th Edition with Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2). See Surface.com/Business for more information. [vi] Tested January 2025 using CineBench 2024 Multi-Core benchmark. Up to 26% faster comparing Laptop 13.8-inch with Intel Core Ultra 7 processors to Surface Laptop 5 13.5-inch with Intel Core i7. Up to 12% faster comparing Surface Laptop 15-inch with Intel Core Ultra 7 processors to Surface Laptop 5 15-inch with Intel Core i7. [vii] Based on 3D Mark WildLife Extreme Unlimited performance testing conducted by Microsoft in January 2025. [viii] Based on a Microsoft Teams 10-person video call test. Testing conducted by third-party lab in January 2025 using preproduction software and preproduction Surface Laptop 15-inch, 7th Edition Intel Core Ultra 7 266V, 16GB RAM, 256 GB and Surface Laptop 5 15-inch Intel Core i7-1265U, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during a Microsoft Teams 10-person video call. All settings were default except screen brightness set to 150 nits with Auto-brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network. Tested with Windows 11. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors. [ix] Enclosure includes A Cover, C Bucket, D Cover. 100% recycled aluminum alloy in A Cover, C Bucket and SIM Tray. 100% recycled rare earth metals in magnets. Based on validation performed by Underwriter Laboratories, Inc. using Environmental Claim Validation Procedure (ECVP) for Recycled Content, dated June 20, 2024. [x] Contains 1.5% recycled cobalt, consisting of 100% recycled cobalt in the battery cell. Based on validation performed by Underwriter Laboratories, Inc. using Environmental Claim Validation Procedure (ECVP) for Recycled Content, UL ECVP 2809-2, Second Edition, dated June 20, 2024. [xi] Surface Pro Keyboard, Surface Pro Flex Keyboard, Surface Slim Pen sold separately. [xii] Based on Cinebench 2024 multithread performance testing conducted by Microsoft in January 2025. [xiii] Based on a Microsoft Teams 10-person video call test. Testing conducted by third-party lab in January 2025 using preproduction software and preproduction Surface Pro, 11th Edition Intel Core Ultra 7 236V, 16GB RAM, 256 GB storage and a Surface Pro 9 with an i7-1225U processor, 16GB RAM and 256GB storage. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during a Microsoft Teams 10-person video call. All settings were default except screen brightness set to 150 nits with Auto-brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network. Tested with Windows 11. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors. [xiv] Enclosure includes bucket and kickstand. 100% recycled aluminum alloy in bucket. 100% recycled rare earth metals in magnets. Based on validation performed by Underwriter Laboratories, Inc. using Environmental Claim Validation Procedure (ECVP) for Recycled Content, UL ECVP 2809-2, Second Edition, dated June 20, 2024. [xv] Solid State Drive (SSD) Retention is only available on Microsoft Surface devices in which the SSD is marketed as removable per the Technical Specifications. Solid State Drive (SSD) Retention is included in both Extended Hardware Service Plus and Microsoft Complete for Business Plus and is also available as an Optional Add-on when purchasing Microsoft Extended Hardware Service and Microsoft Complete for Business. Devices returned to Microsoft with a missing Solid State Drive (SSD) are subject to a Solid State Drive (SSD) replacement fee unless the device is enrolled in the Drive (SSD) Retention offer. [xvi] Releasing first to our Windows Insider community on Copilot+ PCs for select languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish) and file formats, starting early next year, before rolling out more broadly to our customers. See aka.ms/copilotpluspcs [xvii] Software license required. [xviii] Pre-release product shown; subject to change prior to commercial release.View the full article

AI is moving closer to the edge, and Copilot+ PCs are leading the way. With the availability of cloud hosted DeepSeek R1 available on Azure AI Foundry, we’re bringing NPU-optimized versions of DeepSeek-R1 directly to Copilot+ PCs, starting with Qualcomm Snapdragon X first, followed by Intel Core Ultra 200V and others. The first release, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B (Source), will be available in AI Toolkit, with the 7B (Source) and 14B (Source) variants arriving soon. These optimized models let developers build and deploy AI-powered applications that run efficiently on-device, taking full advantage of the powerful NPUs in Copilot+ PCs. The Neural Processing Unit (NPU) on Copilot+ PCs offers a highly efficient engine for model inferencing, unlocking a paradigm where generative AI can execute not just when invoked, but enable semi-continuously running services. This empowers developers to tap into powerful reasoning engines to build proactive and sustained experiences. With our work on Phi Silica, we were able to harness highly efficient inferencing – delivering very competitive time to first token and throughput rates, while minimally impacting battery life and consumption of PC resources. The optimized DeepSeek models for the NPU take advantage of several of the key learnings and techniques from that effort, including how we separate out the various parts of the model to drive the best tradeoffs between performance and efficiency, low bit rate quantization and mapping transformers to the NPU. Additionally, we take advantage of Windows Copilot Runtime (WCR) to scale across the diverse Windows ecosystem with ONNX QDQ format. Get ready to play! First things first…let’s give it a whirl. To see DeepSeek in action on your Copilot+ PC, when available, simply download the AI Toolkit VS Code extension. The DeepSeek model optimized in the ONNX QDQ format will soon be available in AI Toolkit’s model catalog, pulled directly from Azure AI Foundry. You can download it locally by clicking the “Download” button. Once downloaded, experimenting with the model is as simple as opening the Playground, loading the “ deepseek_r1_1_5” model, and sending it prompts.. In addition to the ONNX model optimized for Copilot+ PC, you can also try the cloud-hosted source model in Azure Foundry by clicking on the “Try in Playground” button under “ DeepSeek R1”. AI Toolkit is part of your developer workflow as you experiment with models and get them ready for deployment. With this playground, you can effortlessly test the DeepSeek models available in Azure AI Foundry for local deployment. Silicon Optimizations The distilled Qwen 1.5B consists of a tokenizer, embedding layer, a context processing model, token iteration model, a language model head and de tokenizer. We use 4-bit block wise quantization for the embeddings and language model head and run these memory-access heavy operations on the CPU. We focus the bulk of our NPU optimization efforts on the compute-heavy transformer block containing the context processing and token iteration, wherein we employ int4 per-channel quantization, and selective mixed precision for the weights alongside int16 activations. While the Qwen 1.5B release from DeepSeek does have an int4 variant, it does not directly map to the NPU due to presence of dynamic input shapes and behavior – all of which needed optimizations to make compatible and extract the best efficiency. Additionally, we use the ONNX QDQ format to enable scaling across a variety of NPUs we have in the Windows ecosystem. We work out an optimal operator layout between the CPU and NPU for maximum power-efficiency and speed.. To achieve the dual goals of low memory footprint and fast inference, much like Phi Silica, we make two key changes: First, we leverage a sliding window design that unlocks super-fast time to first token and long context support despite not having dynamic tensor support in the hardware stack. Second, we use the 4-bit QuaRot quantization scheme to truly take advantage of low bit processing. QuaRot employs Hadamard rotations to remove outliers in weights and activations, making the model easier to quantize. QuaRot significantly improves quantization accuracy, compared to existing methods, such as GPTQ, particularly for low granularity settings such as per-channel quantization. The combination of low-bit quantization and hardware optimizations such the sliding window design help deliver the behavior of a larger model within the memory footprint of a compact model. With these optimizations in place, the model is capable of a time to first token of 130 ms and a throughput rate of 16 tokens/s for short prompts (<64 tokens). Stay tuned to learn more about instructions to get the model. We include examples of the original and quantized model responses below to show the minor differences between the two variants, with the latter being both fast and power-efficient: Figure 1: Qualitative comparison. Sample responses from the original model (left) vs NPU-optimized model (right) for the same prompt, including the model’s reasoning capability. The model follows a similar reasoning pattern, and reaches the same answer, demonstrating that the optimized model retains the reasoning ability of the original model. With the speed and power characteristics of the NPU-optimized version of the DeepSeek R1 models users will be able to interact with these ground-breaking models entirely locally.View the full article

AI is moving closer to the edge, and Copilot+ PCs are leading the way. With the availability of cloud hosted DeepSeek R1 available on Azure AI Foundry, we’re bringing NPU-optimized versions of DeepSeek-R1 directly to Copilot+ PCs, starting with Qualcomm Snapdragon X first, followed by Intel Core Ultra 200V and others. The first release, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B (Source), will be available in AI Toolkit, with the 7B (Source) and 14B (Source) variants arriving soon. These optimized models let developers build and deploy AI-powered applications that run efficiently on-device, taking full advantage of the powerful NPUs in Copilot+ PCs. The Neural Processing Unit (NPU) on Copilot+ PCs offers a highly efficient engine for model inferencing, unlocking a paradigm where generative AI can execute not just when invoked, but enable semi-continuously running services. This empowers developers to tap into powerful reasoning engines to build proactive and sustained experiences. With our work on Phi Silica, we were able to harness highly efficient inferencing – delivering very competitive time to first token and throughput rates, while minimally impacting battery life and consumption of PC resources. The optimized DeepSeek models for the NPU take advantage of several of the key learnings and techniques from that effort, including how we separate out the various parts of the model to drive the best tradeoffs between performance and efficiency, low bit rate quantization and mapping transformers to the NPU. Additionally, we take advantage of Windows Copilot Runtime (WCR) to scale across the diverse Windows ecosystem with ONNX QDQ format. Get ready to play! First things first…let’s give it a whirl. To see DeepSeek in action on your Copilot+ PC, when available, simply download the AI Toolkit VS Code extension. The DeepSeek model optimized in the ONNX QDQ format will soon be available in AI Toolkit’s model catalog, pulled directly from Azure AI Foundry. You can download it locally by clicking the “Download” button. Once downloaded, experimenting with the model is as simple as opening the Playground, loading the “ deepseek_r1_1_5” model, and sending it prompts.. In addition to the ONNX model optimized for Copilot+ PC, you can also try the cloud-hosted source model in Azure Foundry by clicking on the “Try in Playground” button under “ DeepSeek R1”. AI Toolkit is part of your developer workflow as you experiment with models and get them ready for deployment. With this playground, you can effortlessly test the DeepSeek models available in Azure AI Foundry for local deployment. Silicon Optimizations The distilled Qwen 1.5B consists of a tokenizer, embedding layer, a context processing model, token iteration model, a language model head and de tokenizer. We use 4-bit block wise quantization for the embeddings and language model head and run these memory-access heavy operations on the CPU. We focus the bulk of our NPU optimization efforts on the compute-heavy transformer block containing the context processing and token iteration, wherein we employ int4 per-channel quantization, and selective mixed precision for the weights alongside int16 activations. While the Qwen 1.5B release from DeepSeek does have an int4 variant, it does not directly map to the NPU due to presence of dynamic input shapes and behavior – all of which needed optimizations to make compatible and extract the best efficiency. Additionally, we use the ONNX QDQ format to enable scaling across a variety of NPUs we have in the Windows ecosystem. We work out an optimal operator layout between the CPU and NPU for maximum power-efficiency and speed.. To achieve the dual goals of low memory footprint and fast inference, much like Phi Silica, we make two key changes: First, we leverage a sliding window design that unlocks super-fast time to first token and long context support despite not having dynamic tensor support in the hardware stack. Second, we use the 4-bit QuaRot quantization scheme to truly take advantage of low bit processing. QuaRot employs Hadamard rotations to remove outliers in weights and activations, making the model easier to quantize. QuaRot significantly improves quantization accuracy, compared to existing methods, such as GPTQ, particularly for low granularity settings such as per-channel quantization. The combination of low-bit quantization and hardware optimizations such the sliding window design help deliver the behavior of a larger model within the memory footprint of a compact model. With these optimizations in place, the model is capable of a time to first token of 130 ms and a throughput rate of 16 tokens/s for short prompts (<64 tokens). Stay tuned to learn more about instructions to get the model. We include examples of the original and quantized model responses below to show the minor differences between the two variants, with the latter being both fast and power-efficient: Figure 1: Qualitative comparison. Sample responses from the original model (left) vs NPU-optimized model (right) for the same prompt, including the model’s reasoning capability. The model follows a similar reasoning pattern, and reaches the same answer, demonstrating that the optimized model retains the reasoning ability of the original model. With the speed and power characteristics of the NPU-optimized version of the DeepSeek R1 models users will be able to interact with these ground-breaking models entirely locally.View the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27783 to the Canary Channel. We are also not planning to release SDKs for 27xxx series builds for the time being. What’s new with Build 27783 Shared Content in File Explorer Home File Explorer will now provide you with quick access to files that have been shared with you. If you are signed into Windows with your Microsoft account, you will be able to view files that have been shared with your account, such as email, Teams chat, etc. If you are a commercial customer who is signed-in with your Microsoft Entra ID account, you will additionally be able to view files that they have shared with others. You can access this feature by launching File Explorer Home and clicking on the ‘Shared’ tab item. You will also be able to view a broader set of file types in their Recent, Favorites, and Shared sections on the homepage. For example, if you’ve recently opened/edited files in Designer, Loop, Power BI, Forms, etc. these files will now be available in your Recent list. [caption id="attachment_177176" align="alignnone" width="712"] File Explorer Home with new tabs for Recent, Favorites, and Shared.[/caption] FEEDBACK: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Files Folders and Online Storage > File Explorer. Changes and Improvements [General] This update includes a small set of general improvements and fixes that improve the overall experience for Insiders running this build on their PCs. [Magnifier] We’re adding a new keyboard shortcut CTRL + ALT + Minus for Magnifier users to quickly toggle between the current zoom and 1X zoom. In addition to the keyboard shortcut CTRL + ALT + Minus to quickly toggle between the current zoom and 1X zoom, we have also added buttons in Magnifier to reset zoom to fit to screen and reset zoom to your last/preferred magnification. [caption id="attachment_177513" align="alignnone" width="536"] New buttons in Magnifier to reset zoom to fit to screen and reset zoom to your last or preferred magnification highlighted in a red box.[/caption] Fixes [Taskbar & System Tray] Fixed an issue which was causing the taskbar preview windows to not display sometimes when hovering over open apps in the taskbar. [Input] Fixed an issue for Pinyin IME users, where switching between windows (like with ALT + Tab) may unexpectedly switch the IME from Chinese to English. [Windowing] Fixed an underlying issue which could lead to unexpected app window freezes for some people when using ALT + Tab between certain types of apps. [Graphics] Fixed an issue causing Settings to crash when going to Settings > System > Display > Graphics for some people. [Remote Desktop] Fixed an issue causing MTSC.exe for Remote Desktop to fail on the previous build with error 0x80080005. Fixed an issue which was causing Remote Desktop to show significant display / rendering issues when connecting to certain other computers. [Other] Fixed an underlying issue which was causing an explorer.exe memory leak in recent Canary Channel builds, leading to performance issues over time. Fixed an issue where the shutdown /r/ /fw command wasn’t working sometimes. Known issues [General] [IMPORTANT NOTE FOR COPILOT+ PCs] If you are joining the Canary Channel on a new Copilot+ PC from the Dev Channel, Release Preview Channel or retail, you will lose Windows Hello pin and biometrics to sign into your PC with error 0xd0000225 and error message “Something went wrong, and your PIN isn’t available”. You should be able to re-create your PIN by clicking “Set up my PIN”. We’re working on the fix for an issue where SFC /scannow is showing errors every time it’s run. [File Explorer] If you open a File Explorer window and minimize it in this build, it may not render correctly when you restore it. [Hyper-V] [NEW] We’re investigating reports that Hyper-V, and other features which rely on Hyper-V (such as WSL) don’t work properly after the last flight. Reminders for Windows Insiders in the Canary Channel The builds we release to the Canary Channel represent the latest platform changes early in the development cycle and should not be seen as matched to any specific release of Windows and features and experiences included in these builds may never get released as we try out different concepts and get feedback. Features may change over time, be removed, or replaced and never get released beyond Windows Insiders. Some of these features and experiences could show up in future Windows releases when they’re ready. Many features in the Canary Channel are rolled out using Control Feature Rollout technology, starting with a subset of Insiders and ramping up over time as we monitor feedback to see how they land before pushing them out to everyone in this channel. Some features may show up in the Dev and Beta Channels first before showing up in the Canary Channel. Some features in active development we preview with Windows Insiders may not be fully localized and localization will happen over time as features are finalized. As you see issues with localization in your language, please report those issues to us via Feedback Hub. To get off the Canary Channel, a clean install of Windows 11 will be required. As a reminder - Insiders can’t switch to a channel that is receiving builds with lower build numbers without doing a clean installation of Windows 11 due to technical setup requirements. The desktop watermark shown at the lower right corner of the desktop is normal for these pre-release builds. Check out Flight Hub for a complete look at what build is in which Insider channel. Thanks, Amanda & BrandonView the full article

At the 2024 Ignite conference last November, we announced scareware blocker for Microsoft Edge which will provide a new, first line of defense against scams. Today, we're excited to share more about how it works and invite you to preview the feature. You've seen it yourself. There are more scams than ever before, on your phone, in your inbox, and in your browser. In fact, our data shows that in 2024, Edge blocked five times more scams on average than it blocked just three years earlier. Today, Edge uses Microsoft Defender SmartScreen to block known scams as people encounter them. But what if you're the first person to see a new scam before it can be blocked? What if a scam hits your coworkers, your friends, or your family? The FBI reports that victims lose over a billion dollars per year to tech support and related scams. While no one is immune, these scams particularly prey on vulnerable elderly communities. “Scareware” scams are a particularly convincing type of tech support scam. They use aggressive web pages to convince victims into thinking their system is infected with malware, pressure them to call a fake tech support number, and try to gain access to the computer. Last year, Hollywood even made a blockbuster action movie with scareware scammers as the villains. Scareware blocker uses a machine learning model to recognize the tell-tale signs of scareware scams and puts users back in control of their computer. We call on users who want to combat scams to help us test our preview. Read on to learn how you can help! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZydkiKDY8xk Figure 1 - Scareware blocker fights tech scams Anatomy of a scareware scam Users can always close a full screen scareware page by PRESSING AND HOLDING the ESC key. We’re hopeful that raising awareness will help users protect themselves, even if they are not using scareware blocker. While users have become more cautious with passwords and the files they download, scareware isn't on most people’s radar. Even the most cautious can fall victim to scareware, as scam websites prey on their caution to create anxiety. Scams move fast to evade detection Scams have become more sophisticated, often moving after a few hours to evade detection. This makes early detection crucial for protecting users. Scareware can appear unexpectedly, especially in rogue online advertisements. For example, you might accidentally click on a misleading banner ad while searching for a product manual, leading you to a scareware site instead of the PDF file you were trying to download. Scareware uses full screen mode just like video sites Scareware sites often use full screen mode, just like popular video sites. Users know they can press ESC to exit full-screen mode, but scareware sites try to camouflage the ESC option, leaving users unsure of what to do next. Scareware uses audio and keyboard mouse tricks to incite panic Scareware sites also use audio and keyboard/mouse tricks to incite panic. They might play a warning from a computer-generated voice, leading victims to believe their computer has an identity theft virus and urging them to call support immediately. Savvy users might suspect a full-screen web page and press ESC, but scareware sites may try to hijack the keyboard and mouse to prevent escape. How scareware blocker will help As mentioned above, most people who land on a scam in Edge will be protected by Defender SmartScreen, which provides real-time checks on new and unfamiliar sites where abuse is more likely to hide. Once an abusive site is detected, SmartScreen can protect users worldwide within minutes. Scareware blocker adds a new, first line of defense to help protect the users exposed to a new scam if it attempts to open a full screen page. Scareware blocker uses a machine learning model that runs on the local computer. The model uses computer vision to compare full screen pages to thousands of sample scams that the scam-fighting community shared with us. The model runs locally, without saving or sending images to the cloud. [caption id="attachment_25650" align="alignnone" width="500"] Figure 2 - How scareware blocker works[/caption] When scareware blocker suspects a page is a scam, Edge will put users back in control by exiting full screen mode, stopping aggressive audio playback, warning the user, and showing a thumbnail of the page they were just viewing: [caption id="attachment_25654" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Figure 3 - Scareware blocker warning the user and putting them back in control[/caption] Send feedback to protect others & avoid false alarms Once the user is back in control of their browser, scareware blocker will let them report the malicious site to protect others. Users can share a screenshot of the scam and other diagnostics with Microsoft, helping the Defender SmartScreen service detect scareware outbreaks across multiple machines. If they don’t choose to report, the scareware blocker model will discard the page. To reduce false alarms, users can also report when scareware blocker makes a mistake and blocks a legitimate page. Sending this feedback makes a difference. By reporting false alarms, you help us make the feature more reliable to catch the real scams. Beyond just blocking individual scam outbreaks, our Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit goes even further to target the cybercrime supply chain directly. Help us stand up to scams by enabling scareware blocker While we recognize that the scareware blocker may not catch every scam—especially as tactics evolve—we are committed to empowering users with solutions while we improve our defenses. Scareware blocker is rolling out now as a preview for all Edge users on Windows PCs. To enable in Edge, first make sure that previews are allowed by your administrator and also that Edge is fully up to date. You may want to restart the browser once more to make sure your Edge client has the preview. After making sure you have the latest updates, you should see the scareware blocker preview listed under "Privacy Search and Services" as shown below. then please browse as you normally would. Your feedback will help us block scams faster and improve the model to reduce false positives! [caption id="attachment_25652" align="alignnone" width="2244"] Figure 4 - Enable scareware blocker today and send feedback to stand up to scams![/caption]View the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4805 (KB5050105) to the Beta Channel. Changes in Beta Channel builds and updates are documented in two buckets: new features, improvements, and fixes that are being gradually rolled out for Insiders who have turned on the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available (via Settings > Windows Update*) and then new features, improvements, and fixes rolling out to everyone in the Beta Channel. For more information, see the Reminders section at the bottom of this blog post. Changes and Improvements gradually being rolled out to the Beta Channel with toggle on* [Snap] We are introducing an improvement to Snap in Windows 11 aimed at driving contextual learning and discovery of the feature. Inline messaging will now appear when you accidentally invoke the Snap Bar when dragging an app to the top middle of your desktop or Snap Flyout when hovering over the Minimize or Maximize button of an app. This messaging is designed to provide guidance on snapping app windows and educating users on the keyboard shortcuts for quickly snapping app windows in the future. We are trying several variants of this experience out. [caption id="attachment_177551" align="alignnone" width="340"] Inline messaging as seen at the top of the Snap Flyout.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_177553" align="alignnone" width="578"] Inline messaging as seen at the top of the Snap Bar.[/caption] [Input] After being temporarily disabled to address some issues with Build 22635.4400, we are beginning to roll out a new Gamepad keyboard layout for the touch keyboard in Windows 11 again. This change introduces the ability to use your Xbox controller to navigate and type. This includes button accelerators (example: X button for backspace, Y button for spacebar) additionally the keyboard keys have been vertically aligned for better controller navigation patterns. [caption id="attachment_177283" align="alignnone" width="691"] New Gamepad keyboard layout for the touch keyboard in Windows 11 that supports the ability to use your Xbox controller to navigate and type.[/caption] [Narrator] We have added new functionalities to Narrator scan mode. Jump to list item (I’) allows you to quickly access and jump to a list item on a page or a document. Beginning and end of element (Comma (,) and Period (.)) allow you to quickly jump to the beginning or end of large tables, lists or landmarks. This is most helpful when navigating through long emails, news articles, and wiki pages. To try these new features, you need to turn on Narrator first (Win key + Ctrl + Enter), then turn scan mode ON by pressing Caps Lock + Spacebar and finally use the new shortcuts – ‘I’, ‘,’ and ‘.’. Please note that scan mode is ‘ON’ by default on most web pages (like news articles, wiki pages, etc.). [Settings] Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers coming to Settings homepage will begin to see a new card for referring a PC Game Pass subscription to their friends to try PC Game Pass for free. This new card will only appear on the Settings homepage if you're signed into your PC with your Microsoft account and meet the required eligibility criteria. [caption id="attachment_177554" align="alignnone" width="487"] New Settings homepage card for referring PC Game Pass to friends.[/caption] Known issues [Start menu] [NEW] We’re working on the fix for an issue causing Start menu to crash for some Insiders when interacting with the letters in the apps list. [File Explorer] If you open a File Explorer window and minimize it in this build, it may not render correctly when you restore it. [NEW] We’re investigating an issue causing File Explorer to be very slow to close for some Insiders when closing using the X button. This may also impact the other title bar buttons. [Settings] The Home page of Settings may crash. If you are impacted by this, you should still be able to open specific Settings pages directly by searching for them from the taskbar. There is a known issue where the two new enterprise-specific device info and accessibility preferences cards are showing up on non-managed PCs signed in with Microsoft accounts. Reminders for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel will receive updates based on Windows 11, version 23H2 via an enablement package (Build 22635.xxxx). Many features in the Beta Channel are rolled out using Control Feature Rollout technology, starting with a subset of Insiders and ramping up over time as we monitor feedback to see how they land before pushing them out to everyone in this channel. For Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel who want to be the first to get features gradually rolled out to you, you can turn ON the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available via Settings > Windows Update*. Over time, we will increase the rollouts of features to everyone with the toggle turned on. Should you keep this toggle off, new features will gradually be rolled out to your PC over time once they are ready. Features and experiences included in these builds may never get released as we try out different concepts and get feedback. Features may change over time, be removed, or replaced and never get released beyond Windows Insiders. Some of these features and experiences could show up in future Windows releases when they’re ready. Some features in active development we preview with Windows Insiders may not be fully localized and localization will happen over time as features are finalized. As you see issues with localization in your language, please report those issues to us via Feedback Hub. Because the Dev and Beta Channels represent parallel development paths from our engineers, there may be cases where features and experiences show up in the Beta Channel first. Check out Flight Hub for a complete look at what build is in which Insider channel. Thanks, Amanda & BrandonView the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.3000 (KB5050103) to the Dev Channel. Changes in Dev Channel builds and updates are documented in two buckets: new features, improvements, and fixes that are being gradually rolled out for Insiders who have turned on the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available (via Settings > Windows Update*) and then new features, improvements, and fixes rolling out to everyone in the Dev Channel. For more information, see the Reminders section at the bottom of this blog post. New features gradually being rolled out to the Dev Channel with toggle on* Improving the battery iconography in Windows 11 Introducing new and improved battery icons in Windows 11! These icons have been designed to communicate battery status of your PC with just a quick glance. Key changes include colored icons to indicate charging states, simplified overlays that don’t block the progress bar, and an option to turn on battery percentage. [caption id="attachment_177547" align="alignnone" width="395"] Battery shown in black, yellow, and green to indicate different charging states.[/caption] When your battery icon is green, this shows that your PC is charging and in a good state. A yellow battery icon will let you know that your PC using battery in energy saving mode – this automatically happens when your battery is less than or equal to 20% to preserve power. When the battery icon is red, you have a critically low battery and should plug in your PC as soon as possible. You will see these new battery icons on the taskbar in the system tray, in the quick settings flyout, and in Settings. The new battery icons will begin showing on the Lock screen in a future flight. As always, your PC’s battery status and more will also be available to you when you hover over the battery icon in the system tray and under Settings > System > Power & battery where you can also adjust the battery level percentage in which energy saver mode kicks on for your PC. [caption id="attachment_177548" align="alignnone" width="700"] The toggle to turn on showing battery percentage in Settings highlighted in a red box.[/caption] Along with the updates to the battery icon, we are also introducing the ability to show your battery percentage next to the battery icon in the system tray – a highly requested feature by Insiders and customers. To enable this, go to Settings > Power & battery and toggle on the "Battery Percentage" setting. [We are beginning to roll this out to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel, so the experience isn’t available to all Insiders just yet as we plan to monitor feedback before pushing it out to everyone.] FEEDBACK: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Power and Battery > Battery. Changes and Improvements gradually being rolled out to the Dev Channel with toggle on* [Input] After being temporarily disabled to address some issues with Build 26120.2213, we are beginning to roll out a new Gamepad keyboard layout for the touch keyboard in Windows 11 again. This change introduces the ability to use your Xbox controller to navigate and type. This includes button accelerators (example: X button for backspace, Y button for spacebar) additionally the keyboard keys have been vertically aligned for better controller navigation patterns. [caption id="attachment_177283" align="alignnone" width="691"] New Gamepad keyboard layout for the touch keyboard in Windows 11 that supports the ability to use your Xbox controller to navigate and type.[/caption] [Narrator] We have added new functionalities to Narrator scan mode. Jump to list item (I’) allows you to quickly access and jump to a list item on a page or a document. Beginning and end of element (Comma (,) and Period (.)) allow you to quickly jump to the beginning or end of large tables, lists or landmarks. This is most helpful when navigating through long emails, news articles, and wiki pages. To try these new features, you need to turn on Narrator first (Win key + Ctrl + Enter), then turn scan mode ON by pressing Caps Lock + Spacebar and finally use the new shortcuts – ‘I’, ‘,’ and ‘.’. Please note that scan mode is ‘ON’ by default on most web pages (like news articles, wiki pages, etc.). [Search on the Taskbar] Improved support for web search providers in Windows Search for the EEA, including clearer provider attribution in tabs. [Oher] Suggested actions that appear when you copy a phone number or future date in Windows 11 are now deprecated. With this build, we’re beginning to disable the feature. Fixes gradually being rolled out to the Dev Channel with toggle on* [General] Fixed an underlying issue which was causing significant performance degradation for a small population of Insiders in the previous flight due to repeated background crashes. [File Explorer] Fixed an issue where sometimes you would be unable to navigate by entering a path in the address bar. Fixed an issue where the File Explorer address bar unexpectedly overlapped with content while in full screen (F11) view. Improved performance of context menu launches for people when right-clicking on cloud files. Made a change to help ensure thumbnails for cloud files are displayed more consistently in search results within File Explorer. Fixed an issue where searching might lose keyboard focus on the text box while you were typing. [Other] Fixed an underlying issue which could lead to scanners not being detected by scanning apps, although the scanner was connected. Fixed an underlying issue which could result in 2 in 1 PCs unexpectedly changing screen orientation when coming out of sleep. Known issues [General] After you do a PC reset under Settings > System > Recovery, your build version may incorrectly show as Build 26100 instead of Build 26120. This will not prevent you from getting future Dev Channel updates which will resolve this issue. A 0xc0e90001 error will occur when booting into Windows Recovery (WinRE) on Arm64 PCs. This will be fixed in the next Dev Channel flight. For recovery options on your PC, visit Settings > System > Recovery. [Recall] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: Recall can be enabled or disabled from “Turn Windows features on or off”. We are caching the Recall binaries on disk while we test add/remove. In a future update we will completely remove the binaries. Some users may see a message to “Make sure Recall is saving snapshots”, while the Settings page for Recall shows saving snapshots is enabled. Reboot your device to resolve this issue. Make sure you update Microsoft 365 apps to the latest version so you can jump back into specific documents. [Click to Do] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: Sometimes additional context is given when using more intelligent text actions powered by Phi Silica. The intelligent text actions leverage the power of Microsoft’s secure cloud to improve your text results by ensuring prompts and responses are safe and appropriate. This data is automatically deleted. Local moderation to ensure the safety of prompts and responses will be added in the future, replacing this cloud endpoint. If any of your actions on image entities are no longer appearing, please ensure you have the latest updates for the Photos and Paint app from the Microsoft Store. [Live captions & real-time translation] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: Some Insiders may see a crash on first launch of live captions. Restart live captions if you encounter this issue and you will not see it again. If audio is playing or the microphone is enabled, switching languages will crash live captions. Stop audio when changing languages to resume captions or translations. [File Explorer] If you open a File Explorer window and minimize it in this build, it may not render correctly when you restore it. [NEW] We’re investigating an issue causing File Explorer to be very slow to close for some Insiders when closing using the X button. This may also impact the other title bar buttons. [Improved Windows Search] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: In this build, the search box on the taskbar does not yet have the same underline and sparkles icon UI that the File Explorer search box has. This is coming in a future flight. In some rare cases, improved Windows search experiences may not be available and may require a reboot to start working. In some rare cases, File explorer search might be unresponsive and may require a reboot to start working. In some rare cases, searching on Outlook while offline might result in some results not being found. The underline animation in the File Explorer search box sometimes does not stop pulsing. The tip about the new search improvements appears whenever you set focus to the search box in File Explorer, rather than only once. Reminders for Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel receive updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2 via an enablement package (Build 26120.xxxx). Updates delivered to the Dev Channel are in a format that offers a preview of enhancements to servicing technology on Windows 11, version 24H2. To learn more, see https://aka.ms/CheckpointCumulativeUpdates. Many features in the Dev Channel are rolled out using Control Feature Rollout technology, starting with a subset of Insiders and ramping up over time as we monitor feedback to see how they land before pushing them out to everyone in this channel. For Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel who want to be the first to get features gradually rolled out to you, you can turn ON the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available via Settings > Windows Update*. Over time, we will increase the rollouts of features to everyone with the toggle turned on. Should you keep this toggle off, new features will gradually be rolled out to your PC over time once they are ready. Features and experiences included in these builds may never get released as we try out different concepts and get feedback. Features may change over time, be removed, or replaced and never get released beyond Windows Insiders. Some of these features and experiences could show up in future Windows releases when they’re ready. Some features in active development we preview with Windows Insiders may not be fully localized and localization will happen over time as features are finalized. As you see issues with localization in your language, please report those issues to us via Feedback Hub. Please note that some accessibility features may not work with features like Recall and Click to Do while in preview with Windows Insiders. Because the Dev and Beta Channels represent parallel development paths from our engineers, there may be cases where features and experiences show up in the Beta Channel first. Check out Flight Hub for a complete look at what build is in which Insider channel. Thanks, Amanda & BrandonView the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we’re releasing Windows 11 Build 26100.3025 (KB5050094) to Insiders in the Release Preview Channel on Windows 11, version 24H2 (Build 26100). Below is a summary of the new features and improvements included as part of this update separated into two sections: gradual rollout and normal rollout. The bold text within the brackets indicates the item or area of the change we are documenting. Gradual rollout The following features and improvements might not be available to all users because they will roll out gradually. Text bolded in brackets indicate the area of the change being documented. [Taskbar] New! This update improves the previews that show when your cursor hovers over apps on the taskbar. The update also improves their animations. [Windows Studio Effects] New! An icon will appear in the system tray when you use an app that supports Windows Studio Effects. This only occurs on a device that has a neural processing unit (NPU). Select the icon to open the Studio Effects page in Quick Settings. To view the app that is using the camera, hover over the icon for a tooltip. [Fonts] New! This update adds Simsun-ExtG, a new simplified Chinese font. It includes the Biangbiang noodles character. Some apps might not be able to display these new extension characters yet. The font has 9,753 ideographs that support Unicode Extensions G, H, and I. See the list below. Unicode range G 30000-3134A (4,939 chars) Unicode range H 31350-323AF (4,192 chars) Unicode range I 2EBF0-2EE5D (622 chars) [File Explorer] New! You now have quick access to items that others have shared with you. Shared items include files, emails, Teams chats, and more. To view them, you must use a Microsoft account or a Microsoft Entra ID account to sign in to Windows. To view these shared items, go to the File Explorer Home page and choose the Shared tab. If you use a Microsoft Entra ID account to sign in, you have more viewing choices. You will see the files that you have shared with others. Also, the Recent, Favorites, and Shared sections of the page will show a broader set of file types. New! When you right-click items in the left pane, the “New Folder” command appears on the context menu. Fixed: After you do a search, that search might repeat when you don’t want it to. Fixed: The date and time properties of a file might update after you copy it. Fixed: Icons on the details pane might not update as you expect when you change a theme. This makes it hard to view the change when you switch between dark and light themes. Fixed: The search box might lose input focus as you type. [Mobile hotspot] New! The Windows Mobile Hotspot now supports 6 GHz connections. This new band requires chips that support the feature and updated drivers. The chips that support 6 GHz Wi-Fi might not support the 6 GHz mobile hotspot. To view this new band, go to Settings > Network & internet > Mobile hotspot. In the Network properties section, select Edit. To work with existing devices, the mobile hotspot will only use 6 GHz when you enable it. [Settings] New! You can change time zones in Settings > Time & Language > Date & Time. You don’t have to be an admin to make this change. [Domains] Fixed: A device might fail to join a domain. [Mouse] Fixed: The mouse cursor might disappear. This occurs when you hover over text fields in certain applications. Fixed: If you turn on pointer trails, the mouse cursor becomes transparent, and a black box appears behind it. Fixed: The mouse cursor might stutter when it moves across the screen. This occurs even when the system is not using a lot of resources. [Pinyin Input Method Editor (IME)] Fixed: When you switch app windows, the IME language might change from Chinese to English. [Snipping Tool] Fixed: Snipping Tool screenshots might be distorted. This occurs when you use two or more monitors that have different display scaling. [Task Manager] Fixed: It takes too long to close after you close the app. [Microsoft Excel 2016] Fixed: When you open certain files, Excel opens, but the screen might remain on the loading screen. [Dam.sys] Fixed: A watchdog timeout error might occur when your PC resumes from sleep. [Windows update installation] Fixed: Cumulative updates might not install. The error code is 0x800736b3. This occurs after a feature on demand fails to install. Normal rollout This update includes the following features and improvements that are rolling out as part of this update. Text bolded in brackets indicates the area of the change being documented. [Windows Backup] New! You will now have a standard Windows 11 taskbar after restoring from a backup via the Windows Setup experience (OOBE) on a new Windows PC. You can still find your apps in the Start menu and Search and pin apps you want to your taskbar. This change is not yet rolling out in the EEA (European Economic Area). [High dynamic range (HDR)] Fixed: The display of some games appears oversaturated. This occurs when you use Auto HDR. Thanks, Windows Insider Program TeamView the full article

We announced the release of Microsoft Edge Game Assist (Preview) just before the holidays, and we've been thrilled by the response from players. Today, we're excited to share that we're expanding the preview of Game Assist to Edge Stable, making it even easier for players to try it without installing special software or changing your default browser. We're also excited to share some of the latest changes we've made based on your feedback. Game Assist (Preview) arrives in the Stable channel For technical reasons, the initial preview of Game Assist required you to install Edge Beta 132 and set it as your default browser. With the release of Edge Stable 132, Game Assist is available without any Insider software or needing to change your default browser, making it even easier to use on your gaming PC. To opt-into Game Assist (Preview), open Edge, go to Settings and more ("...") > Settings, search for Game Assist in the search box, find the Game Assist option, and select Install widget. It's that easy. From now on, you can access Game Assist (Preview) at any time by opening Game Bar with Win+G. If you're already using Game Assist, you don't have to change anything. Going forward Game Assist will use Edge Stable by default, but for the latest and greatest updates you can set it to use Edge Beta, Dev, or Canary instead. To do this, simply set the channel you'd like to use as your default browser and restart Game Assist. What's new in Game Assist In the weeks since the preview launched, we've been working to add new features and address your top feedback. Support for additional games is available in Stable today, and we have a number of other improvements in the Canary and Dev channels. These updates will make their way to Beta and eventually Stable in the coming weeks. Without further ado, here's what's new in Game Assist (Preview). Discover tips and guides for some of the hottest new releases The initial preview of Game Assist offers contextual tips and guides for a selection of popular PC games while we optimize the experience based on your feedback. In addition to Baldur's Gate 3, Diablo IV, Fortnite, Hellblade II: Senua's Saga, League of Legends, Minecraft, Overwatch 2, Roblox, and Valorant, Game Assist now supports some of the hottest new releases including: Dragon Age: The Veilguard Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Marvel Rivals Metaphor: ReFantazio S.T.A.L.K.E.R. II: Heart of Chernobyl Support for these titles is currently rolling out and will appear for everyone by tomorrow. Don't see your favorite game on the list? Stay tuned! We'll add tips and guides for even more popular games throughout the preview and over time. In the meantime, you can still use Game Assist to browse your favorite guides or other websites while playing any game. Improving the browser experience, support for some extensions, and more Expanding Game Assist (Preview) to Stable and adding tips and guides for some of the hottest releases aren't the only things our team's been up to this past month. We've also made a number of improvements to the browser experience and added support for some extensions like ad blockers. For more on what's new, please check out our support page. Going forward, this page will be the best source for all the latest updates to Game Assist. A sneak peek at what's coming up That's not all. We're currently working on the next wave of updates, including support for keyboard shortcuts, a Settings and more (...) menu with common browser controls (including the ability to add the current tab as an app on the sidebar), right-click context menus, an improved picture-in-picture experience, and more. These are just some of the near-term improvements, and we have more planned for the coming weeks and months. We want to hear what you think! I want to close by saying thank you for all the feedback you've given us so far. It's already helping us shape the feature, and you'll start to see more of your suggestions reflected in the coming months. As you continue using Game Assist, please keep telling us what you think. You can share your feedback in Game Assist by going to Settings and more ("...") > Send feedback. You can also vote on which features you want to see added to Game Assist using the Game Assist Community feedback portal, and we'll be monitoring feedback on r/MicrosoftEdge, X, and other social channels as well. Happy gaming!View the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.2992 (KB5050083) to the Dev Channel. With this update, we are previewing improved Windows Search with Windows Insiders with Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs. New Copilot+ PC experiences Improved Windows Search We are making finding your documents, photos, and settings across Windows 11 easier on Copilot+ PCs by introducing semantic indexing along with traditional indexing. Whether it’s searching in File Explorer, in the Windows search box on your taskbar, or in Settings – just type what’s on your mind to find it on your Copilot+ PC. You no longer need to remember file names, exact words in file content, or settings names. For example, you can use your own words to find images by typing "bridge at sunset", documents by describing what they are about like "Europe trip budget", or settings like "change my theme”. Thanks to the power of the 40+ TOPS NPU onboard Copilot+ PCs, these search improvements work even when you’re not connected to the internet. [caption id="attachment_177534" align="alignnone" width="476"] Use your own words to search for documents and images in File Explorer.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_177536" align="alignnone" width="770"] Use your own words to search for documents and images from your taskbar.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_177537" align="alignnone" width="366"] Use your own words to change settings on your Copilot+ PC in Settings.[/caption] Today, searching for files on your Copilot+ PC with improved Windows Search will only work for files saved locally in indexed locations on your PC. You can go to Settings > Privacy & security > Searching Windows to adjust which locations are indexed on your PC or turn on “Enhanced” to index your entire PC. In a future flight, we will support searching for documents and photos stored in cloud storage providers such as OneDrive. Searching for settings like "change my theme” will work within the Settings app for now. In a future flight, you will be able to do this within the Windows search box on the taskbar. These improved Windows Search experiences will gradually roll out to Windows Insiders on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, with support for AMD and Intel-powered Copilot+ PCs coming soon. These experiences are supported in select languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish) and document formats. Supported file formats include .txt, .pdf, .docx, .doc, .rtf, .pptx, .ppt, .xls, .xlsx for documents and .jpg/.jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .ico for images. See here for more details. You can learn more about semantic search on Copilot + PCs here. FEEDBACK for File Explorer Search: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Files Folders and Online Storage > File Explorer Search. FEEDBACK for Windows Taskbar Search: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Desktop Environment > Search. FEEDBACK for Settings Search: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Settings > Search Settings. New text action for Click to Do (Preview) You’ll see a new text action for Click to Do available on Copilot+ PCs called Refine. To try this out, press Win + Click directly on a block of text or press Win + Q and then navigate to the text you’d like to proofread and refine. When you open the menu, the new action will be under Rewrite > Refine. [caption id="attachment_177538" align="alignnone" width="773"] New Refine text action in Click to Do.[/caption] All the other actions you’ve seen in Click to Do are still here. If anything looks missing, please check the Microsoft Store for the latest Photos and Paint apps installed. You can learn more about using Click to Do here. FEEDBACK: Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F) under Desktop Environment > Click to Do. Other changes included in this Dev Channel update This update (Build 26120.2992) includes other changes and improvements available to Windows Insiders across all Windows 11 PCs in addition to the features noted above that are exclusive to Copilot+ PCs. These changes are documented below in two buckets: New features, improvements, and fixes that are being gradually rolled out for Insiders who have turned on the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available (via Settings > Windows Update*). New features, improvements, and fixes rolling out to everyone in the Dev Channel. For more information, see the Reminders section at the bottom of this blog post. Changes and Improvements gradually being rolled out to the Dev Channel with toggle on* [File Explorer] We’ve added a New Folder option in the context menu when right-clicking locations in the navigation pane. [Magnifier] We’re adding a new keyboard shortcut CTRL + ALT + Minus for Magnifier users to quickly toggle between the current zoom and 1X zoom. In addition to the keyboard shortcut CTRL + ALT + Minus to quickly toggle between the current zoom and 1X zoom, we have also added buttons in Magnifier to reset zoom to fit to screen and reset zoom to your last/preferred magnification. [caption id="attachment_177513" align="alignnone" width="571"] New buttons in Magnifier to reset zoom to fit to screen and reset zoom to your last or preferred magnification highlighted in a red box.[/caption] Fixes gradually being rolled out to the Dev Channel with toggle on* [File Explorer] Fixed an issue where the date/time properties of files were unexpectedly updated in some cases after copying them. Fixed an issue where File Explorer may sometimes lose focus on the search box while typing. Fixed an issue where when you did a search it may unexpectedly trigger the search happening repeatedly. Fixed an issue where the Details Pane icons weren’t responding correctly to theme changes, making it hard to see if you switched from dark to light or vice versa. Fixed a black flash in File Explorer that appeared when duplicating a tab. [Task Manager] Fixed an issue where Task manager wrongly identified an HDD as an SSD. [Click to Do] We fixed the issue where Click to Do would sometimes not highlight any info on screen if there is no content on a connected external monitor in extended mode. Changes and Improvements gradually being rolled out to everyone in the Dev Channel [Windows Backup] You will now have a standard Windows 11 taskbar after restoring from a backup via the Windows Setup experience (OOBE) on a new Windows PC. You can still find your apps in the Start menu and Search and pin apps you want to your taskbar. Fixes for everyone in the Dev Channel [Other] [Windows Kernel Vulnerable Driver Blocklist file (DriverSiPolicy.p7b)] This update adds to the list of drivers that are at risk for Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) attacks. Known issues [General] After you do a PC reset under Settings > System > Recovery, your build version may incorrectly show as Build 26100 instead of Build 26120. This will not prevent you from getting future Dev Channel updates which will resolve this issue. [NEW] A 0xc0e90001 error will occur when booting into Windows Recovery (WinRE) on Arm64 PCs. This will be fixed in the next Dev Channel flight. For recovery options on your PC, visit Settings > System > Recovery. [Recall] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: Recall can be enabled or disabled from “Turn Windows features on or off”. We are caching the Recall binaries on disk while we test add/remove. In a future update we will completely remove the binaries. Some users may see a message to “Make sure Recall is saving snapshots”, while the Settings page for Recall shows saving snapshots is enabled. Reboot your device to resolve this issue. Make sure you update Microsoft 365 apps to the latest version so you can jump back into specific documents. [Click to Do] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: Sometimes additional context is given when using more intelligent text actions powered by Phi Silica. The intelligent text actions leverage the power of Microsoft’s secure cloud to improve your text results by ensuring prompts and responses are safe and appropriate. This data is automatically deleted. Local moderation to ensure the safety of prompts and responses will be added in the future, replacing this cloud endpoint. [NEW] If any of your actions on image entities are no longer appearing, please ensure you have the latest updates for the Photos and Paint app from the Microsoft Store. [Live captions & real-time translation] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: Some Insiders may see a crash on first launch of live captions. Restart live captions if you encounter this issue and you will not see it again. If audio is playing or the microphone is enabled, switching languages will crash live captions. Stop audio when changing languages to resume captions or translations. [File Explorer] [NEW] If you open a File Explorer window and minimize it in this build, it may not render correctly when you restore it. [Improved Windows Search] The following known issues will be fixed in future updates to Windows Insiders: [NEW] In this build, the search box on the taskbar does not yet have the same underline and sparkles icon UI that the File Explorer search box has. This is coming in a future flight. [NEW] In some rare cases, improved Windows search experiences may not be available and may require a reboot to start working. [NEW] In some rare cases, File explorer search might be unresponsive and may require a reboot to start working. [NEW] In some rare cases, searching on Outlook while offline might result in some results not being found. [NEW] The underline animation in the File Explorer search box sometimes does not stop pulsing. [NEW] The tip about the new search improvements appears whenever you set focus to the search box in File Explorer, rather than only once. Reminders for Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel receive updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2 via an enablement package (Build 26120.xxxx). Updates delivered to the Dev Channel are in a format that offers a preview of enhancements to servicing technology on Windows 11, version 24H2. To learn more, see https://aka.ms/CheckpointCumulativeUpdates. Many features in the Dev Channel are rolled out using Control Feature Rollout technology, starting with a subset of Insiders and ramping up over time as we monitor feedback to see how they land before pushing them out to everyone in this channel. For Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel who want to be the first to get features gradually rolled out to you, you can turn ON the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available via Settings > Windows Update*. Over time, we will increase the rollouts of features to everyone with the toggle turned on. Should you keep this toggle off, new features will gradually be rolled out to your device over time once they are ready. Features and experiences included in these builds may never get released as we try out different concepts and get feedback. Features may change over time, be removed, or replaced and never get released beyond Windows Insiders. Some of these features and experiences could show up in future Windows releases when they’re ready. Some features in active development we preview with Windows Insiders may not be fully localized and localization will happen over time as features are finalized. As you see issues with localization in your language, please report those issues to us via Feedback Hub. Because the Dev and Beta Channels represent parallel development paths from our engineers, there may be cases where features and experiences show up in the Beta Channel first. Check out Flight Hub for a complete look at what build is in which Insider channel. Thanks, Amanda & BrandonView the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we’re releasing Windows 11 Build 22631.4825 (KB5050092) to Insiders in the Release Preview Channel on Windows 11, version 23H2 (Build 22631). Below is a summary of the new features and improvements included as part of this update separated into two sections: gradual rollout and normal rollout. The bold text within the brackets indicates the item or area of the change we are documenting. Gradual rollout The following features and improvements might not be available to all users because they will roll out gradually. Text bolded in brackets indicate the area of the change being documented. [Taskbar] New! This update improves the previews that show when your cursor hovers over apps on the taskbar. The update also improves their animations. [Windows Studio Effects] New! An icon will appear in the system tray when you use an app that supports Windows Studio Effects. This only occurs on a device that has a neural processing unit (NPU). Select the icon to open the Studio Effects page in Quick Settings. To view the app that is using the camera, hover over the icon for a tooltip. [Work across devices] New! You know that you can use an iOS or Android phone to access your Microsoft OneDrive files. If you do that when your PC is locked, you can now continue working on that file from where you left off on your PC. Just sign in to your PC within five minutes of using your phone. When Windows asks if you want to resume work on that file, select the file to open it. To use this feature, you must sign in to OneDrive and your PC using the same Microsoft account. Work and school accounts do not support this feature. This feature works for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and PDF files. For the best experience, sign in to OneDrive on your PC using your default browser. To manage this feature, go to Settings > Apps > Resume. [Fonts] New! This update adds Simsun-ExtG, a new simplified Chinese font. It includes the Biangbiang noodles character. Some apps might not be able to display these new extension characters yet. The font has 9,753 ideographs that support Unicode Extensions G, H, and I. See the list below. Unicode range G 30000-3134A (4,939 chars) Unicode range H 31350-323AF (4,192 chars) Unicode range I 2EBF0-2EE5D (622 chars) [File Explorer] New! You now have quick access to items that others have shared with you. Shared items include files, emails, Teams chats, and more. To view them, you must use a Microsoft account or a Microsoft Entra ID account to sign in to Windows. To view these shared items, go to the File Explorer Home page and choose the Shared tab. If you use a Microsoft Entra ID account to sign in, you have more viewing choices. You will see the files that you have shared with others. Also, the Recent, Favorites, and Shared sections of the page will show a broader set of file types. New! When you right-click items in the left pane, the “New Folder” command appears on the context menu. Fixed: After you do a search, that search might repeat when you don’t want it to. Fixed: The date and time properties of a file might update after you copy it. Fixed: Icons on the details pane might not update as you expect when you change a theme. This makes it hard to view the change when you switch between dark and light themes. Fixed: The search box might lose input focus as you type. [Windows Share] New! You can now share directly to apps that support sharing in Windows. Just right-click local files in File Explorer or on the desktop. [Magnifier app] New! This update adds a new keyboard shortcut: CTRL + ALT + Minus sign. Use it to quickly switch between the current zoom and 1X zoom. New! This update adds buttons to reset zoom. You can reset zoom to fit to the screen and reset zoom to your last or preferred magnification. [Snipping Tool] Fixed: Snipping Tool screenshots might be distorted. This occurs when you use two or more monitors that have different display scaling. [Chinese Pinyin IME] Fixed: When you switch app windows, the IME language might change from Chinese to English. Normal rollout This update includes the following features and improvements that are rolling out as part of this update. Text bolded in brackets indicates the area of the change being documented. [Task Manager] Fixed: The CPU index number might be wrong when you set process affinity. This occurs on servers that have two or more non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes. [Remote desktop] Fixed: When you reconnect to a console session, it stops responding. Fixed: The Action Center does not display in certain scenarios. [Exporting chart objects] Fixed: You can’t export a file to PDF and XLSX formats if the file has a chart object. [Virtual memory] Fixed: An issue depletes virtual memory, which might cause some apps to fail. [Chinese Pinyin input method editor (IME)] Bing will stop giving automatic suggestions in the search box for search engine sites, like Baidu. To get manual suggestions, use Ctrl + Tab or the chevron button (>). [Near Field Communication (NFC) readers] Fixed: At times, they fail to read card Universal Unique Identifiers (UUID). This occurs after many point-of-sale (POS) app scans. [USB Print and IPP Over USB] Fixed: An installed printer fails when the spooler initializes. [Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP)] This update adds support for Y210, Y216, Y410, and Y416 for the High Efficiency Image File (HEIF) format. [Windows Kernel Vulnerable Driver Blocklist file (DriverSiPolicy.p7b)] This update adds to the list of drivers that are at risk for Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) attacks. Thanks, Windows Insider Program TeamView the full article

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.4800 (KB5050085) to the Beta Channel. Changes in Beta Channel builds and updates are documented in two buckets: new features, improvements, and fixes that are being gradually rolled out for Insiders who have turned on the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available (via Settings > Windows Update*) and then new features, improvements, and fixes rolling out to everyone in the Beta Channel. For more information, see the Reminders section at the bottom of this blog post. Changes and Improvements gradually being rolled out to the Beta Channel with toggle on* [Widgets] In this flight, we're introducing the ability for web developers to easily utilize their existing web content to build dynamic and interactive widgets that can be added to the widgets surfaces in Windows 11. For more information, click here. [File Explorer] We are temporarily disabling the change that began rolling out with Build 22635.4580 where File Explorer opens in a new tab by default if you have an existing File Explorer window open when launching File Explorer from outside of File Explorer (for example, from an app or from the desktop) to address some issues. [Windows Backup] You will now have a standard Windows 11 taskbar after restoring from a backup via the Windows Setup experience (OOBE) on a new Windows PC. You can still find your apps in the Start menu and Search and pin apps you want to your taskbar. [Search on the Taskbar] Improved support for web search providers in Windows Search for the EEA, including clearer provider attribution in tabs. [Settings] We are rolling out “top cards” under Settings > System > About. These top cards provide an easy way to view your PC’s key specifications—processor, RAM, storage, and GPU—helping you understand your PC’s capabilities at a glance. This is designed to simplify decision-making by highlighting potential areas for hardware improvements while giving you a clear snapshot of your PC. Top Cards won’t appear yet on managed commercial PCs. ALT-TEXT: New top cards at the top of the About settings page displaying your PC’s processor, RAM, storage, and GPU specifications. [caption id="attachment_177527" align="alignnone" width="657"] New top cards at the top of the About settings page displaying your PC’s processor, RAM, storage, and GPU specifications.[/caption] We are starting to roll out the Settings homepage for commercial customers on PCs managed by an IT administrator. The feature will show some existing cards relevant to enterprise-managed PCs like “Recommended settings” and “Bluetooth devices” as well as two new enterprise-specific device info and accessibility preferences cards. For commercial customers who also use their Microsoft account on their managed PC, there will also be a new accounts card indicating the presence of both work and school and Microsoft account types. We are starting the rollout of this gradually with managed commercial PCs who have both work and school and Microsoft accounts present seeing this experience first. [caption id="attachment_177526" align="alignnone" width="638"] The Settings homepage for a commercial customer on a managed PC.[/caption] Fixes gradually being rolled out to the Beta Channel with toggle on* [File Explorer] As part of our ongoing commitment to improving File Explorer accessibility, this updates includes increased support for the text scaling (via Settings > Accessibility > Text size) across File Explorer, File Open/Save dialogs and the copy dialogs. Changes and Improvements gradually being rolled out to everyone in the Beta Channel [Windows Backup] You will now have a standard Windows 11 taskbar after restoring from a backup via the Windows Setup experience (OOBE) on a new Windows PC. You can still find your apps in the Start menu and Search and pin apps you want to your taskbar. Known issues [File Explorer] [NEW] If you open a File Explorer window and minimize it in this build, it may not render correctly when you restore it. [Settings] [NEW] The Home page of Settings may crash. If you are impacted by this, you should still be able to open specific Settings pages directly by searching for them from the taskbar. [NEW] There is a known issue where the two new enterprise-specific device info and accessibility preferences cards are showing up on non-managed PCs signed in with Microsoft accounts. Reminders for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel will receive updates based on Windows 11, version 23H2 via an enablement package (Build 22635.xxxx). Many features in the Beta Channel are rolled out using Control Feature Rollout technology, starting with a subset of Insiders and ramping up over time as we monitor feedback to see how they land before pushing them out to everyone in this channel. For Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel who want to be the first to get features gradually rolled out to you, you can turn ON the toggle to get the latest updates as they are available via Settings > Windows Update*. Over time, we will increase the rollouts of features to everyone with the toggle turned on. Should you keep this toggle off, new features will gradually be rolled out to your PC over time once they are ready. Features and experiences included in these builds may never get released as we try out different concepts and get feedback. Features may change over time, be removed, or replaced and never get released beyond Windows Insiders. Some of these features and experiences could show up in future Windows releases when they’re ready. Some features in active development we preview with Windows Insiders may not be fully localized and localization will happen over time as features are finalized. As you see issues with localization in your language, please report those issues to us via Feedback Hub. Because the Dev and Beta Channels represent parallel development paths from our engineers, there may be cases where features and experiences show up in the Beta Channel first. Check out Flight Hub for a complete look at what build is in which Insider channel. Thanks, Amanda & BrandonView the full article