New Windows 10 Build reveals a new start menu and improved Alt-Tab feature

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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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