Don’t you just love it when things return to normal? After some expected delays in recent past, Microsoft is now back and on schedule with another Windows 11 preview version.
This new version is now live in the Dev channel of the Windows Insider Program in form of build 25120.
And it brings with a big change in the form of interactive desktop content.
Widgets!
Or some sorts of desktop integration of widgets.
Build 25120 is, of course, part of the Sun Valley 3 development drive behind Redmond walls, which will eventually become the version that is released in 2023. With the first major update for the OS almost finalized, action is naturally shifting towards this next major release.
As Microsoft notes in the announcement post, the big highlight for this version is the only major improvement. And that is a new feature in the form of interactive content on the desktop.
The image below shows the desktop integration of what can obviously be called widgets. In this case we have a search box that is placed right on the desktop to quickly search the web. A reboot is required after updating to this build to trigger this experience, and not everyone will have it enabled, by the way.
But this is simply a way for the company to test the waters with the widgets feature, and the development team is likely working on more such widgets.
In some sense, this is a step closer towards those gadgets in prior versions of Windows, though there is still a long way to go before we can label this feature as those interactive experience. Nevertheless, the direction is set.
Microsoft does say that it is possible to disable this feature, and it encourages everybody to send feedback in order to further polish the experience.
Of course, this is a Dev build meant to test out new features and options, there is no telling whether this interactive content feature will make it to the Beta and then the final stable builds of Windows 11.
This build further contains a bunch of additional fixes and improvements, and there are a few known issues that you need to be aware of as well. The desktop watermark is also back in this build after it went missing in action in previous ones.
Oh, and ARM64 devices are also able to upgrade to this build.
And it is also available in ISO form, which you can download here to use for your clean installs.
