Today, Microsoft is releasing its first Windows 11 Insider Preview of the new year, bringing the build number to 22526. As usual, it’s available in the Dev channel, which is for testing out new features and is not tied to any specific release of the OS. That means that the new features might arrive in this fall’s feature update, or they might not.
For this build specifically, the changes are pretty minor. Here’s the full list of changes and improvements:
- We’re experimenting with showing ALT + TAB as windowed instead of full screen for some Insiders.
- We have added support for wideband speech when using Apple AirPods products (AirPods, AirPods Pro, or AirPods Max), improving audio quality for voice calls.
- Starting with Build 22518, Credential Guard is now enabled by default on Windows 11 Enterprise (E3 and E5) licensed PCs that are enterprise-joined.
- We are experimenting with indexing more file locations so that using search to find important files in Files Explorer is quicker.
As you can see, there’s nothing really crazy going on here. It makes sense though. Despite the fact that there hasn’t been a new Windows 11 Insider Preview in the Dev channel in a few weeks, it’s worth remembering that that’s because the team was off for the holidays. They’ve only been back to work since Monday.
The few changes that are there are notable. ALT + TAB being windowed instead of full-screen is certainly a big visual change in behavior. However, it’s only available to a subset of the people that explicitly sacrificed their system’s stability in order to try new features by joining the Dev channel. The rest of the changes, such as wideband speech for AirPods, are available for everyone.