Microsoft has just released the Windows 11 preview build 22494 for Insiders in the Dev channel, which introduces the ability to mute or unmute your microphone from the Taskbar during Microsoft Teams calls. A new microphone icon will appear in the taskbar during a Teams call, allowing users to quickly mute and unmute their microphone.
This new experience is only rolling out to a subset of Insiders using Microsoft Teams with a work or school account, with support for Teams for consumers calls coming later. Microsoft will also allow other communications apps to use this new capability, and the microphone button will also be able to display your call audio status and what app is accessing your microphone.
Starting with this build, Microsoft is also experimenting with making snap groups appear in ALT + TAB and Task View. This new experience will only appear for some Insiders, and Microsoft will be listening to feedback before expanding it to more testers.
Today’s build 22494 also brings various fixes and improvements for the Windows 11 Task Bar, File Explorer, the Settings app, and Windows Search. You can check out the full list of changes, bug fixes, and known issues in the build 22494 below:
Changes and Improvements
- We are trying out showing snap groups in ALT + TAB and Task View with some Windows Insiders just like when you hover open apps on the taskbar, and you see them there. This isn’t available to all Insiders just yet as we plan to monitor feedback and see how it lands before pushing it out to everyone.
- If you’re searching for file type or link types under Settings > Apps > Default apps, we’ll now show a dropdown of options containing your current query without having to first press enter.
- If needed, you can now launch the installed apps settings page under Settings > Apps > Installed apps directly via this URI: ms-settings:installed-apps.
- Adjusted the names of the sort by options under Settings > Apps > Installed apps to help make them clearer and added a new option to sort from smallest to largest size.
Fixes
[Taskbar]
- Tooltips should no longer appear in random places on the Taskbar after sliding your mouse over volume, battery, network, or other icons in the Taskbar corner.
- Addressed an underlying issue that was leading to come unexpected duplication of certain icons in the Taskbar corner.
[File Explorer]
- Addressed an issue that was causing the context menu to crash for some people if you tried to scroll it.
- Did some work to help address an issue where in certain areas of the screen the context menu submenus would draw on top of the context menu instead of beside it (for example, if you hovered over New).
- The context menu icons should be less blurry on systems with multiple monitors with mixed DPI now.
- Addressed an issue that could cause selecting Open With in the context menu to unexpectedly just open the file in certain cases rather than actually opening the Open With dialog.
- Renaming files on the desktop is back up and running in this flight.
- Made another adjustment to the command bar underlying logic to help improve performance of command actions in File Explorer.
[Search]
- Fixed a recent issue that was causing the indexer database to become too fragmented, leading to the indexer unexpectedly consuming a large amount of memory and CPU for a prolonged period of time. This was particularly noticeable for people that have large Outlook mailboxes.
[Input]
- Mitigated an issue that was causing certain apps to hang when trying to drag something with the Shift or Ctrl key held down.
- Fixed an issue that was causing the touch keyboard to not appear on tablets when tapping the text field if you were to try to reset your PIN from the login screen.
- Improved reliability of the Pen menu.
[Windowing]
- Fixed a few explorer.exe crashes related to using windowing features (snap, ALT + Tab, and Desktops).
- If you open Task View on a system with multiple monitors, the background should now be acrylic on both monitors.
- Addressed a couple UI issues with the window thumbnails in Task View and ALT + Tab, notably that the close button might get cut off if the app window was too thin.
[Settings]
- Addressed an issue where Facial Recognition (Windows Hello) might be unexpectedly greyed out in Sign-in Settings in certain cases until closing and opening Settings.
- Fixed an issue where Storage Sense wasn’t cleaning up C:\Windows\SystemTemp.
- Standard users (aka non-admins) should now be able to change the time zone in Settings if Location access is not granted, rather than the dropdown going blank.
[Other]
- Fixed an issue causing links to Windows Update, Recovery and For developers to show under the main Windows Update Settings page.
- Fixed a bug where images had a yellow tonality in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Lightroom Classic when in HDR mode.
- Mitigated an issue related to DHCP that was causing unexpected power usage while the screen was off in recent builds for some Insiders.
- Did some work to help address an issue where Service Host: WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service would unexpectedly utilize a lot of CPU.
- Fixed an issue that could cause some devices to have a black screen when coming out of sleep (where the lock screen wouldn’t display).
- Addressed an underlying issue that was causing some users with ARM64 PCs to experience an increase in Microsoft Teams crashes in the last few Dev Channel builds.
- We have increased the padding for selected items as seen by clicking Show More Options in the File Explorer context menu, or the menu options in Task Manager.
- WSL: Fixed error 0x8007010b when accessing Linux distributions via `\\wsl.localhost` or `\\wsl$` (Issue #6995).
NOTE: Some fixes noted here in Insider Preview builds from the active development branch may make their way into the servicing updates for the released version of Windows 11 that became generally available on October5th.
Known issues
[General]
- Users updating from Builds 22000.xxx, or earlier, to newer Dev Channel builds using the latest Dev Channel ISO, may receive the following warning message: The build you are trying to install is Flight Signed. To continue installing, enable flight signing. If you receive this message, press the Enable button, reboot the PC, and retry the update.
- Some users may experience their screen and sleep timeouts being reduced. We’re investigating the potential impact that shorter screen and sleep timeouts could have on energy consumption.
[Start]
- In some cases, you might be unable to enter text when using Search from Start or the Taskbar. If you experience the issue, press WIN + R on the keyboard to launch the Run dialog box, then close it.
[Taskbar]
- The Taskbar will sometimes flicker when switching input methods.
- We’re investigating an issue in this build where the clock in the Taskbar can get stuck and not updated, particularly when accessing the PC via Remote Desktop.
[Input]
- Clipboard history says it is empty even if it is enabled and should contain content. This is a UI issue we’re investigating – when a flight goes out with a fix, any pinned items should become available again.
[Search]
- After clicking the Search icon on the Taskbar, the Search panel may not open. If this occurs, restart the “Windows Explorer” process, and open the search panel again.
[Quick Settings]
- We’re investigating reports from Insiders that the volume and brightness sliders aren’t displaying properly in Quick Settings.
If Microsoft continues to test new features with a subset of Windows Insiders on the Dev Channel, the new Windows Subsystem for Android and integration with the Amazon Android App store remain only available on the Beta channel. The Windows Insider team previously said that Dev Channel will eventually get to test Android apps, but there’s still no ETA.
