Microsoft is testing a dramatic overhaul of the controversial Windows 11 Start menu. Potentially rolling out later this year, the changes aim to address some of the many criticisms that have dogged the menu over the years.
Windows tester phantomofearth enabled an overhauled version of the Start menu from a recent Windows 11 beta build, the menu’s first substantial rethink since Windows 11 launched a little over three years ago, according to The Verge.
As Ars Technica reports, the new, larger Start menu displays up to two rows of eight pinned apps—you can’t see more than two rows by default, but you can expand this section to show more apps—and then shows the scrollable list of apps installed on your PC. This list is hidden behind an “All” button on the current Start menu. These apps can be displayed as a vertically scrollable list, in a horizontal grid, or sorted by category (which does appear to be the most space-efficient display option).
Perhaps most interestingly for people who are tired of Windows’ constant reminders and recommendations, the new Start menu looks like it lets you turn that “Recommended” section off entirely, replacing it with a full list of all apps installed on your PC. I find the Recommended area inoffensive when it sticks to showing me recently installed apps or opened files, but recent Windows 11 builds have also used it to advertise apps from the Microsoft Store.
Microsoft continues to tweak the Windows 11 UI in other ways as well. A beta build released to Windows Insider testers earlier this month enables “taskbar icon scaling,” which can shrink your taskbar icons to a smaller size to make more of them if you have enough apps pinned or opened at the same time (currently, the taskbar reclaims space first by shrinking the size of the search box and widget areas and then by tucking extra icons behind an ellipsis icon in an overflow area). Users can also choose to preserve the current taskbar behavior or use smaller icons all the time to gain some extra space.
The taskbar changes are likely to come to the standard public version of Windows 11 sooner rather than later, since Microsoft is testing them in its Windows Insider Beta channel—that’s the second-most-stable channel for new Windows 11 builds, in between the near-final Release Preview channel and the experimental Dev channel.
The Start menu changes could be officially announced in a future Windows 11 preview build, or they could never actually be enabled at all. These hidden Windows 11 changes often end up rolling out to the public—things like the Windows version of the Sudo command were initially discovered this way—but Microsoft occasionally tests things internally that don’t end up becoming part of the public version of Windows in the end.
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