New Windows 10 Build reveals a new start menu and improved Alt-Tab feature
Hey, it's getting Vista style again, puns aside it seems that Microsoft is planning to overhaul the Windows 10 start menu with a new design. In the insider ring and thus Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20161 they show that a new start menu is pending. Also, adjustments have been made to the Alt-Tab function and the taskbar can be further personalized.
What’s new in Build 20161
Theme-aware tiles in Start
We are freshening up the Start menu with a more streamlined design that removes the solid color backplates behind the logos in the apps list and applies a uniform, partially transparent background to the tiles. This design creates a beautiful stage for your apps, especially the Fluent Design icons for Office and Microsoft Edge, as well as the redesigned icons for built-in apps like Calculator, Mail, and Calendar that we started rolling out earlier this year.
This refined Start design looks great in both dark and light theme, but if you’re looking for a splash of color, first make sure to turn on Windows dark theme and then toggle “Show accent color on the following surfaces” for “Start, taskbar, and action center” under Settings > Personalization > Color to elegantly apply your accent color to the Start frame and tiles.
LT + TAB between apps and sites
Are you a multitasker? We have exciting news for you! Beginning with today’s build, all tabs open in Microsoft Edge will start appearing in Alt + TAB, not just the active one in each browser window. We’re making this change so you can quickly get back to whatever you were doing—wherever you were doing it.
If you’d prefer fewer tabs or the classic Alt + TAB experience, we’ve added some settings for you under Settings > System > Multitasking. You can configure Alt + Tab to only show your last three or five tabs or choose to turn this feature off completely.
A more personalized Taskbar for new users
We want to help customers get the most out of their PCs from day one, and that starts with offering a cleaner, more personalized, out-of-box experience to give you the content you want and less clutter. This provides us with a flexible, cloud-driven infrastructure to test customer reception of default Taskbar content and tailor these layouts based on user and device signal. We will evaluate the performance of individual default properties, monitoring diagnostic data and user feedback to assess an audience’s reception. Using this in
Windows Calculator graphing mode feature now rolling out to the public
We are happy to announce that the graphing mode feature we released to Insiders in January is now rolling out to the general public! Adding support for graphing was one of our top feature requests, so we’re excited to bring this feature to our users. Graphing capabilities are also essential for students who are beginning to explore linear algebra. With this feature, we hope to empower students to learn mathematics by improving their conceptual understanding and attitudes towards math. Windows Calculator showing multiple equations with variables plotted on the graph as the variables update live.
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Senior Member
Posts: 100
Joined: 2009-11-19
I like the look of the Start Menu. Functionality is more or less the same, but it just has a more pleasing appearance to me. The few apps that had useful live tiles (like weather, calendar, etc.) still work, while the others look like and blend in with normal non-UWP apps.
Senior Member
Posts: 528
Joined: 2005-02-23
Yet Calculator still have no ability to edit expression. Every single Android calculator have it.
Senior Member
Posts: 1338
Joined: 2010-07-25
I hope they also fixed the bugs with the start menu. It would be so nice if expanding expandable tiles wouldn't mess with the possition of other tiles, create empty spots and make some of them disappear every now and then until you re-arrange the tiles to fill the mysteriously appeared gaps. That's much more important than giving it a visual overhaul, in my humble opinion.
Senior Member
Posts: 11809
Joined: 2012-07-20
I am on bit older build, yet I have those. Graphs in Calc use DX11.
And start menu is not anything to look at. It is kind of weird since I use vertical taskbar.
Senior Member
Posts: 6481
Joined: 2012-11-10
Of all these features, only the graphing calculator is especially interesting to me.
If I really wanted to alt-tab between my browser tabs, I'd open them in a new browser.