Microsoft has released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002 for PC
What’s new in Build 15002Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002 released
Microsoft Edge Updates
The Microsoft Edge Team has lots of new features to share, focused on making it easier than ever to keep track of your tabs and pick up where you left off, as well as a few other surprises!
Tab preview bar: It’s easy to lose track of what’s in your tabs, especially when you have many tabs from the same site, with similar titles and icons. Tab preview bar allows you to easily glance at a visual preview of every tab you have open without leaving your page. You can scroll through the list with touch, mouse wheel, or a touchpad. Just click the chevron icon next to your tabs to get started. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
Tab preview bar in Microsoft Edge
Set these tabs aside: We often hear that it’s a headache to keep all your tabs organized, and to pick up where you left off. Sometimes you just need to set everything aside and start from a clean slate. We’ve added two new buttons next to your tabs in Microsoft Edge to help you quickly manage all your tabs without losing your flow.
Set these tabs aside in Microsoft Edge
Jump List for Microsoft Edge: You can now launch a new window or new InPrivate window for Microsoft Edge straight from its Taskbar icon. Simply right-click or swipe up on the Microsoft Edge icon in the Taskbar, and pick the task you want!
Jump List in Microsoft Edge
Component UI: This release introduces a new UWP architecture for Microsoft Edge’s multi-process model, including a new visual tree and new input model. These changes will help improve stability and input responsiveness and make the browser UI more resilient to slow or hung web page content. Be on the lookout for any issues with tab launches and activation or input (including keyboard, mouse, or touch) and share feedback in the Feedback Hub if you have problems!
Flash Click-to-Run: Microsoft Edge will now block untrusted Flash content by default until the user explicitly chooses to play it. This means better security, stability, and performance for you, while preserving the option to run Flash when you choose. You can learn more about this change on the Microsoft Edge Dev Blog: Extending User Control of Adobe Flash with Click-to-Run. We will be evolving this experience in upcoming flights to make the option to run Flash content more contextually obvious.
Flash Click-to-Run in Microsoft Edge
Web Payments: Microsoft Edge now has preview support for the new Payment Request API, which allows sites to make checkout easier using the payment and shipping preferences stored in your Microsoft Wallet. This is currently in a preview state for developers and will not process payment information until a future flight. You can learn more about Payment Request on the Microsoft Edge Dev Blog.
Web payments in Microsoft Edge
For a complete list of all the changes in Microsoft Edge, visit the Microsoft Edge changelog.
Start and Shell Improvements
Tile Folders in Start: As part of our ongoing effort to converge experiences across devices, and to address your feedback, we’re excited to let you know that with today’s build you will now be able to group your Start tiles into folders. Tile folders are a way for you to organize and personal your tiles in Start, and we’re happy to now bring this to Windows 10 PCs. To get started, drag and drop a tile on top of another tile in Start to create a folder.
Tile Folders in Start
Updated Windows Share experience: We have redesigned the Windows sharing experience to be more app-focused and integrated with where you are sharing from. The new Windows Share experience will pop-up the new share flyout within the app you are sharing from and give you a list of applications you can share to. This list changes based on your usage.
New Windows Share experience
The WIN + H hotkey, used in the old Windows share experience, has been removed.
Capture a region of your screen: OneNote 2016’s popular screenshot feature is now built into Windows 10! You can use Win + Shift + S to capture a region of your screen and copy it to the clipboard for pasting into OneNote for Windows 10 or any other app. Please note that this feature replaces the one in OneNote 2016.
Improved high-DPI support for desktop apps: Continuing from our work with Build 14986, Build 15002 brings more goodness in the way of high-DPI support. First, much like we did with Microsoft Management Console (MMC), we’ve updated Performance Monitor (Perfmon) to now be more crisp on high-DPI PCs. Second, while we’ve enabled these improvements by default for some Windows desktop apps, you can now enable them yourself for other GDI-based applications, too! To do this, you’ll need to find the application’s .exe file, right-click on it, and select Properties. Go to the Compatibility tab, and turn on System (Enhanced) DPI scaling, and click OK. This setting overrides the way that applications handle DPI scaling (which sometimes uses bitmap stretching and can result in applications rendering blurry) and forces them to be scaled by Windows. The setting that was previously labeled Disable display scaling on high DPI settings is now referred to as Application scaling. This works only for apps that use GDI.
Improved high-DPI support for desktop apps
Smooth Window Resize: One of the things we’ve heard from Windows Insiders is that the animation when resizing windows isn’t always smooth. We’ve taken that feedback, and Insiders should see improved performance and smoothness when resizing GDI-based Desktop applications (such as File Explorer, Task Manager, and Notepad) and UWP apps (such as Groove Music and Outlook Mail). In addition to this work, we’ve also updated our code so that when rapidly resizing UWP apps, the window frame background will be transparent as the app adjusts, rather than a flat base color.
Desktop Icon Placement and Scaling Improvements: We’ve heard from you that sometimes desktop icons aren’t scaled or arranged as expected, particularly after docking/undocking your device, working with monitors that have different DPI, or projecting your monitor. We want users to feel that desktop icons are stable, scaled properly, and move predictably when changing monitor configurations, so we’ve made changes to how this logic works in order to address your feedback. Now when you change your multi-monitor configuration, dock/undock your device, project your display, add or remove monitors, or otherwise make changes that affect the icon scaling, you should see an improvement in how the system adjusts the layout of your desktop icons. Try it out and let us know how it goes!
Simplified and faster VPN access: A much requested feature from our VPN users, we’ve updated the Network flyout so that after selecting a VPN, you can now click connect from within the flyout rather needing to open VPN Settings. We appreciate the feedback and look forward to what you have to share next! If you encounter any issues, you can still connect to VPN from the VPN Settings (and please log feedback letting us know about it!)
Improved sign-in dialog for apps: We have improved the app sign-in experience for users with multiple accounts. The new sign-in dialog shows your available Microsoft, Work, or School accounts and gives you the ability to add new accounts to Windows.
Lunar Calendar support for the Taskbar: Those of you who follow the Simplified or Traditional Chinese lunar calendar can now use the taskbar calendar to quickly check the lunar date alongside the current Gregorian date. Special holidays are called out in accent-colored text. Go to Settings > Time & Language > Date & Time to pick which additional calendar you’d like to see. Thanks to everyone who sent in feedback requesting this!
Lunar Calendar support for the Taskbar
Improving our notification experience for app developers and everyone: App developers are increasingly facing scenarios within their applications where they require more flexibility to organize notifications to provide the desired user experience. To provide a more relevant and crafted experience to Windows users, we will now provide app developers a way to create custom subgroups for their notifications in Action Center. Also, to address issues where notifications might have the wrong time stamp (for example, if your PC was asleep when you received a cross-device notification from your phone), we’re enabling app developers to override the notification timestamp. If you’re an app developer, please check out the Tiles and Toasts blog for coming posts about how you can leverage these new features.
Windows Ink Improvements
We have updated the Windows Ink pen, pencil and highlighter control to now visually indicate which color is selected. You can try this out now in the Windows Ink Workspace. Other apps can take advantage of this with future updates of the Windows 10 Creators Update SDK.
In addition, thanks to your feedback, we’ve added point erase to the Windows Ink Workspace’s Sketchpad and Screen Sketch. This means that now you have the option of deleting your whole ink stroke or erasing only pieces of it. You can select your desired option by tapping the eraser icon, where you’ll find new options to switch between eraser types.
Windows Ink improvements
We’ve also updated our taskbar logic, so that if you have the Windows Ink Workspace icon on your taskbar, it displays the taskbar of every monitor. Clicking it launches the Windows Ink Workspace on that monitor.
More Cortana improvements
Easier discovery of Cortana’s app-specific commands: Many of our awesome app developers have been adding commands for Cortana to help you get where you need to go even faster—for example directly launching radio stations, playing movies, or searching for recipes. For apps that support these commands, we will now bubble up suggested commands as you type the app name in Cortana. Clicking a particular suggestion launches the app with that command. Once you know the command, you can also trigger it by simply saying it to Cortana. Not sure which apps have added this feature? Check out this handy Store collection: Better with Cortana! Once you’ve downloaded an app, you’ll need to launch it once. Wait a few hours, and everything will be all good to go.
More recurrence options for Reminders: We’ve heard your feedback, and with this build of Windows we’ve added a new option to set recurring time-based Cortana Reminders for “Every Month” or “Every Year” —great for bill payment or anniversary reminders!
Keyboard shortcut change for invoking Cortana: The keyboard shortcut to invoke Cortana in listening mode is changing to WIN + C. This shortcut will be off by default. If you’d like to use it now, head to Cortana’s settings and you’ll find a new option to enable it. WIN + Shift + C will be used to open the App Charms menu, seen in the title bar of Windows 8 apps.
Accessibility Improvements
A more inclusive experience out of the box: The Windows Out-Of-Box-Experience (OOBE) Team has been working to reimagine how people set up their PCs for the first time. Our goal is to make this simpler and more accessible so every person powering on their new PC can independently set it up. While we have made numerous improvements in past releases to achieve this goal, we now want to take it to the next level where people can listen and respond to Cortana verbally (when asked questions*) to further simplify and make the setup process more accessible to even more people.
A more inclusive experience out of the box
This new experience is still a work in progress, so there are some places that still include the older OOBE pages and Cortana is unable to help you get your PC fully set up. We plan to continue to do more work on this so stay tuned! While you can’t access the Feedback Hub during OOBE, please take a moment once you’ve reached the desktop to complete the Quest and log feedback in the Feedback Hub.
*Works for languages that support Cortana. For languages that don’t support Cortana, you will still get the new experience without the speech capabilities.
Note: We are working on making Installation media (ISOs) available for Build 15002 in the next week for Windows Insiders to more easily try out this experience.
UPDATE 1/13: The ISOs are now available for Build 15002!
Narrator support for WinPE and WinRE: This build also now supports the use with Narrator from WinPE for installing Windows as well as troubleshooting options with WinRE. When we make the ISOs available for this build, you’ll be able to try this out by building a bootable USB drive or other bootable media and using the ISO files. After booting into WinPE, wait 15-20 seconds and then use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + WIN + Enter to launch Narrator. You will need to restart Narrator to use it after any reboot during the install process.
NOTE: Not all audio devices are supported. USB headsets are the recommended option for audio, since the full Windows audio drivers for the PC are not available in WinPE/WinRE. Built-in speakers may also work on some PC’s but if you do not hear Narrator announce that it is starting, try connecting a USB headset and restarting Narrator. Narrator Touch is not supported during OS install.
Braille support in Windows: Not too long ago, we mentioned Braille support was coming to Windows. That work is starting to appear in builds, and you will find a new button that offers the ability to download support for braille via Settings > Ease of Access > Narrator. While this button is present, the feature doesn’t work yet so hold off on giving it a try for now. We’ll let you know in a future post when braille can be used.
Narrator users please take note that the Narrator keyboard shortcut is changing: To help reduce accidental launch of Windows Narrator, we have updated the hotkeys to be more intentional from WIN + Enter to Ctrl + WIN + Enter.
Narrator Improvements: We’ve made several improvements to Narrator for navigation when using Scan mode. You can now navigate to headings of a specific level by typing the number of the heading level you want e.g. 1 for the next heading level 1. Add shift for the previous heading. In addition, Narrator’s Scan Mode now allows you to press Home and End to move to the start and end of a line of text respectively when pressed. Finally, when in Scan Mode you can press Ctrl + Home and Ctrl + End to move to the start or end of the web page or other content you are reading.
Improved legibility for UWP apps in high contrast: As part of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, we improved the legibility of many websites viewed in high contrast by showing an opaque layer behind the text. We recognize that similar to the state of websites on the Internet, many UWP apps have not been tailored to present an optimal experience for users who need increased contrast. So, we’re taking a similar approach to improve how UWP apps look in high contrast. We’ve updated the XAML framework to now display an opaque layer behind the text and coerce semi-transparent UI to be fully opaque. This addresses the most common issues in apps like in the before/after screenshot below. These adjustments are applied by default in high contrast and apply to *all* XAML Store applications that run on Build 15002 and higher, whether they explicitly target this build (with the SDK) or not. However, applications that render their own text on something such as a SurfaceImageSource do not receive the automatic adjustment from the framework. If you find any issues with this work, please log them here, and as always, you can reach out to @MSFTEnable on Twitter at any time about accessibility problems and requests you have for accessibility in Windows.
Improved legibility for UWP apps in high contrast
In addition, we’ve updated Windows Ink to now support a rich color range experience when using your device in high contrast. Try it out in Sketchpad today and let us know what you think!
