Windows 10 20H1 Preview Build 18970
Microsoft is starting to roll out a new tablet experience for convertible PCs to a portion of Insiders. It allows you to enter the tablet posture and stay in the familiar desktop you’re used to. It also includes the following improvements.
Increased spacing between Taskbar icons.Search box on taskbar collapsed into an icon.File Explorer switches to touch optimized layoutTouch keyboard auto invokes when you tap text fields.
There is a new cloud-based recovery option with the Reset This PC feature. Instead of only doing a local reinstall from existing Windows files, this provides a way to download Windows 10 from Redmond servers. Microsoft notes that the recovery option will “remove apps you have installed. And if the “Remove everything” option is selected, all of your data will be deleted.
In addition to the changes listed above, here is the list of other fixes and improvements included in today’s build:
We fixed a DWM memory leak that was impacting the previous two flights.We fixed an issue resulting in some WSL distros not loading (Issue #4371).We fixed an issue impacting a small number of Insiders, involving a lsass.exe crash and resulting in a message saying, “Windows ran into a problem and needs to restart.”We fixed an issue resulting in WIN+(period) closing if you tried to search for an emoji when focus was set to a text field in an Electron app.We fixed two issues that could result in Settings crashing when interacting with options on the Search page.We’ve done some work to help improve the launch performance of Settings when the Setters header is visible.We fixed an issue resulting in some Insiders experiencing a bug check with BTHport.sys in recent flights.It’s important to periodically back up your data. Starting in recent Insider builds, Windows Home and Pro users without a first party backup solution will now see a friendly reminder to consider setting up a backup option that is included with Windows. If you’d prefer to turn this off, there’s an option to do so in the notification.We’re working on addressing feedback about the acrylic in certain surfaces not appearing immediately. In this build, it’s fixed for Start menu, the volume flyout, the network flyout, the clock & calendar flyout, and notification toasts.We’ve made some bug fixes and improvements to Magnifier reading capabilities.Improved Magnifier performance when moving the mouse around the screen.We resolved an issue where Control + Alt + L would not put Magnifier into Lens mode.No one likes bugs, so we squashed several of them related to the new text cursor indicator. Text cursor indicator now appears and disappears more reliably. We also fixed an issue where text cursor indicator preview in settings did not change size when text scaling was on.We have made improvements in Magnifier reliability.We fixed an issue where the File Explorer search suggestions weren’t being read out by Narrator.We fixed an issue in Narrator where it would speak “unknown” if you had the “Header Status” column enabled within Outlook as you arrowed between different email messages.We fixed a couple Narrator dialog reading issues. Narrator would sometimes speak “empty document” or stop the dialog reading too early.We fixed an issue where Narrator would not always speak the group name of a radio button on web pages.We fixed an issue with Narrator and Excel not speaking the column header when arrowing between cells in a table.We fixed an issue where Narrator would only speak “item” when navigating by table cells in an Outlook email instead of reading the entire cell’s contents.Narrator will now read webpages from the top of the page and not at the main landmark with a fallback to find a paragraph. Thank you for your feedback!Narrator now supports the aria-haspopup property.Improved Outlook performance and stability when reading mail messages in Outlook.We have made improvements in Narrator reliability.We made a change to Narrator input learning, so you just have to press Narrator + 1 once to turn input learning off. Thank you for your feedback.We fixed an issue when a user navigated to a webpage in Edge, Narrator would read just the URL field and not the webpage.We fixed an issue when a user was replying to an email in Outlook, Narrator was automatically reading the message while the user was trying to type.
With Insider builds you can expect a lot of bugs and other issues for both users and developers. Make sure to read Microsoft’s full release notes for all changes, known issues, and workarounds.
