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.
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.
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.
[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.
[Voice Access]
- [NEW] Voice access may not work in this build.
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 & Brandon
