I was personally very disappointed with the Windows 11 experience, but I’ve seen enough from Microsoft to hope I can finally change my mind. In a very long blog post, Navjot Virk, Microsoft’s vice president for Windows Experiences, gave us an overview of everything that’s coming to the age-old operating system, and it’s not just the quality of life improvements that could make Windows 11 an OS you actually want to use.
Microsoft has been planning these fixes for some time, and they are now available in Insider’s beta and will see a full release later this year. There are dozens of improvements, including the ability to move the taskbar to the sides like you could in previous versions of the operating system. I’ve seen the promised land for myself, and it’s a Windows 11 experience that might not suck after all. I’ve seen, although I haven’t played with it yet, several pieces of revised functionality built into Microsoft’s operating system. Namely, the new search features and the Photos app are both completely redesigned, work faster, and offer more features than before.
The search is especially better now. Currently, clicking the search function brings up a menu that takes up a third of the screen, and if you’re looking for a simple toggle for your keyboard backlight, a Bing search will appear instead through Edge. In the future, Search could offer even more features than Spotlight on Mac. The new search can display controls for functions like Do Not Disturb or mic volume directly in the search box without having to navigate to a settings menu. Depending on your search, it may also expand to display an image of a PowerPoint or Word document before opening it.
One of my pet peeves is how I have to search for the full term “Power, sleep, and battery settings” to change my PC’s power modes. The new search showed this setting on the first try. Search can even use Phone Link with a connected Android device to send text messages, although you’re probably better off replying to messages that appear in the new pop-ups at the bottom right of the screen. Plus, you can now send files from your desktop directly to a connected phone.
The Photos app will also be completely overhauled. It now includes a semantic search feature to let you search for specific people or objects across all images on your PC, OneDrive, or connected phone. The app now lets you quickly crop photos or adjust the lighting for each scene. One of the most unique new features is the ability to change the lighting in a photo, such as adding a “golden hour” sunset to a scene where you can physically set the directions of the light sources.
This all comes six years after Microsoft first released its latest operating system to the public. Let’s just admit that the optics of Windows 11 over the last few years have been terrible. Microsoft put Windows 10 out to pasture this month a year ago. It wasn’t the ideal time to make the transition, as Microsoft flooded its latest operating system with pop-ups and ads for its Copilot services and features that added nothing to the core Windows experience. Copilot also received its own redesign to make it less intrusive.
Then, as RAMageddon kicked into high gear, making laptops with 16GB or more of RAM more and more expensive, Microsoft itself began bombarding Surface laptops with limited memory options that, simply put, don’t perform well under Windows 11. The RAM reduction process is a big reason why this new Windows 11 revitalization could prove even more important.
The new Search feature and Photos apps are now built directly into Windows using WinUI3. Previously, these and most other desktop functions used WebView2, a developer control tool that is essentially a browser application. This meant you could edit each application independently of Windows itself, but browsers took up more memory than something natively integrated into the operating system. Now, Microsoft’s beloved Windows 11 widgets won’t automatically load on your desktop if you’re using a low-end PC. PCs will also keep 2GB of your active data free, instead of moving it to slower SSD storage like the OS did before.
You can consider this a sort of apology tour from Microsoft. The company wants you to actually love Windows, so much so that it promises to offer a collection of older and newer games, like Gears of War: Reloaded And The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Editionwith a new purchase of a Windows 11 PC from November. Is this enough? I guess we’ll find out together. It takes time, but maybe we’ll get a chance to enjoy Windows 11 for a few more years before Microsoft inevitably upgrades to Windows 12.
Gn tech
