Windows 10 19H1 build 18317 is out, splits up Windows Search and Cortana, adds better Start reliability

Microsoft is rolling out today the Windows 10 19H1 build 18317 to Windows Insiders in the Fast Ring. After some testing with select Insiders in recent weeks, this new build finally separates Cortana from Windows Search in the task bar. “This will enable each experience to innovate independently to best serve their target audiences and use cases,” the Windows Insider team explained today.

This new build brings other significant updates, including some background changes to make the Start Menu more reliable than before. The Windows 10 Settings app has also been updated with A Better Font management experience and a revamped Windows Insider Settings page. You can find more details about all these changes below:

Separating Search and Cortana

Going forward, we’ll be decoupling Search and Cortana in the taskbar. This will enable each experience to innovate independently to best serve their target audiences and use cases. Some Insiders have had this update for a few weeks now, and we appreciate all the feedback we’ve received about it so far! For those new to this update, when it rolls out to you, you’ll find clicking the search box in the taskbar now launches our experience focused on giving you the best in house search experience and clicking the Cortana icon will launch you straight into our voice-first digital assistant experience.

Other available Search and Cortana settings have also now been split between the two, along with the familiar group policies.

This change is one of several we’ve made throughout this release to improve your experience in this space, including updating the search landing page design, enhancing your search results, and integrating Microsoft To-Do with Cortana. If you have any further feedback, please don’t hesitate to share it with us here.

Note: Cortana is currently only available in supported markets.

The next step in improving Start reliability

As some of you may already know, up until now Start in Windows 10 has been hosted by something called ShellExperienceHost.exe. In order to provide you the best possible Start experience, we’re separating it into its own process, called StartMenuExperienceHost.exe. This has a number of benefits, including simplifying debugging and insulating Start from potential issues impacting other surfaces. This has been running as an experiment for a few weeks now and we’ve seen measurable improvements in the reliability amongst those that have the change, so we’re rolling it out to everyone.

We’re also making a change so that Start no longer suspends, which improves launch time.

A Better Font management experience in Settings

Insiders today can now drag and drop font files from File Explorer into the modern Settings > Fonts page to install them. After installation, click on the font in the Font page, to view the different font faces associated with the font and all the details of the font. You can also uninstall the font from this font details page. Drag and drop font installation by default is installed as a per-user font which does not require elevation, hence it will not be available for other users. To install the font for all users in the device, use the “Install for all Users” option by right clicking the font on file explorer.

A simpler Windows Insider Program Settings page

We are introducing a simplified Windows Insider Program Settings page via Settings > Update & Security > Windows Insider Program with Build 18317. The goal is to make the end-to-end experience of signing up for the Windows Insider Program and setting up your PC to take new builds much easier by simplifying the experience and removing some of the clutter. You’ll find that all the same functionality is still there.

Under “Pick your Insider settings” is where you can change your Insider ring on your PC.

Windows Console Updates

We’ve made several fixes & improvements in Windows Console in and leading up to build 18317, including:

• Fixed spurious text artifacts being displayed when running cscope in a Linux VM via ssh
• Fixed GitHub issue 296 where the incorrect mouse button ID was being reported when a mouse button was released, resulting in an “unexpected mouse-drag behavior” regression
• Fixed GitHub Issue 313, enabling colors above index #15 to be set via VT OSC 4
  • Colors <= 99 fixed in this build
  • Colors > 99 fixed in up-coming build
• Corrected sizing issues for Linux alt-buffer apps (e.g. vim, emacs, etc.) resulting in more reliable resizing
• Fixed some issues with Consoles growing in height if scroll-forward is disabled
• Fixed ConPTY, enabling underline VT sequences to now pass correctly, allowing ConPTY-enabled apps (e.g. VSCode’s integrated terminal) to correctly receive and display underlined text
• Made ConPTY flush its output buffer before terminating ensuring apps receive all input and display correct output
• When running Tmux, correctly restore state after Win + D, resulting in Tmux’s last line of text rendering correctly
• Fixed Console to preserve a Console window’s currently colored text when executing Cmd.exe
• If using raster fonts, Console now correctly preserves the user’s font after running .NET Core code (which defaults to UTF-8 codepage 65001)
• Correct how Console scrolls text region, fixing how text is rendered in Linux’ `screen`
• Significantly improved performance of ConPTY – perf now very close to “raw pipe”

Overall, Cortana being separated from Windows Search is pretty big news, and this should give more room to other digital assistants like Alexa (now available as a Microsoft Store app). Cortana has been a part of Windows Search since the launch of Windows 10, but the company seems to have come to the conclusion that this wasn’t such a good idea. In the preview build 18309 released earlier this month, Microsoft also removed the Cortana voice-over when you clean install Pro, Enterprise, or Education editions of Windows. Cortana will still have its place in the Windows 10 task bar going forward, but it no longer seems to be a core functionality of Windows 10.

As usual, the preview build 18317 also fixes a long list of bugs, and it also includes the three issues that were fixed in the cumulative update build 18312.1007 released yesterday. You can learn more about the general fixes and known issues in the build 18317 in our separate post.