Windows 10 has officially hit a billion users and Microsoft
recently teased upcoming changes to the operating system in a
low-quality video. Today, Microsoft has finally posted
high-resolution screenshots of Windows 10’s upcoming changes,
which gives us a closer look at the new Start menu and other
bits and pieces of the refreshed UI.
The new Start menu looks sleeker and simplified, and live tiles
are still part of it for select apps such as Weather, News,
Mail, and Photos.
As we’ve seen before, the revamped Start menu features new app
icons, but older elements haven’t been entirely discontinued
yet.
The live and custom colour tiles have disappeared for the most
part, but these elements haven’t been entirely discontinued as
Microsoft is still using live tiles for apps such as Weather,
News and Calendar, where it makes more sense.
The Start menu looks less of a hotchpotch by removing the
custom colour for apps that have been around since Windows 8.
If you currently use live tiles for other apps, you can
continue to do so according to Microsoft. As you can in
the GIF below, the Start menu comes with both Fluent Design
icons and rounded corners.
In the previous teaser, Panos Panay showed off the new nicely
streamlined File Explorer with a much clearer and less
cluttered interface to view your files or folders. For some
unknown reasons, Microsoft Edge has replaced File Explorer in
the new teaser.
While these improvements are really nice, we still don’t know
when this revamped desktop experience will actually arrive.
Microsoft hasn’t announced anything on that front, but it’s
expected that these interface changes will be part of a Windows
10 preview update later this year, and consumers will see them
early next year.
Currently,
Windows 10 May 2020 Update is scheduled to arrive later in
May and
20H2 minor update is expected to arrive later in 2020.
A new Start menu experience is not a minor change – so we’ll
have to until the first update of 2021 for it to arrive in the
production branch.
