Microsoft is ditching an unpopular change to the Windows 11 Start Menu
Windows 11 users will surely be pleased to see Microsoft ditch an idea introduced in testing late last year, namely recommended websites appearing in the Start menu (as well as a second unpopular change that has just been elbowed).
The latest preview build of Windows 11 witnessed the abandonment of these changes, which is build 25272, which has just been released to the dev channel (early testing).
The discarded Start menu feature first appeared in November 2022 in preview 25247 and allowed popular websites to be recommended at the bottom of the menu panel.
How Ghakis (opens in a new tab) mottled, w blog post (opens in a new tab) detailing the changes in the latest preview of Windows 11, Microsoft further noted that the suggested search action for copied text in the Edge browser has also been dropped. This meant that if you highlighted text to be copied in, say, a document, a built-in panel appeared that allows you to click and search for that highlighted text in Edge.
Microsoft said: “Thank you to all the insiders who have given us feedback on these two experiences. As a reminder, features and experiences we are trying out in the dev channel may be removed and will never be made available outside of the dev channel as we incubate new ideas and receive feedback from Insiders.”
Analysis: backing off the edge
Build 25272 also introduced a whole bunch of fixes, including fixing an issue where the taskbar search box was corrupted by visual glitches, and a whole bunch of bugs were resolved with the Task Manager.
There are certainly some useful things going on here, even if there are no new features. And it’s good to see the back of the two aforementioned pieces of functionality, the first of which was basically an unnecessary clutter in the Start menu and raised concerns about Microsoft pushing third-party websites – and of course its own Edge browser in both cases.
While Microsoft cautiously noted when introducing the Featured Websites feature last year that it could be turned off for those who don’t want it, there has been clear feedback from users about even trying to bring the feature to the Start menu – the good news is that the company is listening these opinions.
However, it must be said that constantly trying to push the Edge browser in Windows becomes quite tiresome.
