Windows 11 build 22593 brings new features in Dev and Beta Channels

Windows 11 build 22593 rolls out with new features in the Dev and Beta Channels.
The update introduces a new Home page and tweaks for File Explorer.
Build 22593 also brings change for security, Snap layouts, and input.
Also, this flight delivers a slew of fixes.

Microsoft is now rolling out Windows 11 build 22593 for devices enrolled in the Dev and Beta Channels of the Windows Insider Program. This is another update that brings more new features, improvements, and a slew of fixes that are likely to arrive with version 22H2.

According to the official changes, build 22593 for Windows 11 brings an updated version of File Explorer with a new homepage, improves Snap layouts, notifies users whether the memory integrity feature is turned on, and there are a bunch of new fixes.

Although devices enrolled in the Beta Channel will also receive this update with the new enhancements, devices in the Dev Channel may include additional features and concepts that may never ship on a final version of Windows 11.

Build 22593 for Windows 11 changes and fixes

Here are all the new features and improvements for the latest release of Windows 11 in the Dev and Beta Channels:

File Explorer

Windows 11 build 22593 introduces an updated version of File Explorer that introduces a new default home page. Technically, Microsoft renamed the “Quick access” page to “Home.” However, the “Quick access” name will now be the name of the first section in “Home,” and the “Pinned files” section is now called “Favorites.”

Furthermore, the recent and pinned files sections are now searchable using the search box in File Explorer, even if they are not local files.

Taskbar

In the Taskbar, the Quick link menu (Windows key + X) now includes the “Terminal” entry to open the Windows Terminal app. The Windows PowerShell entry will appear if the console isn’t available.

Focus

As part of the Focus features, build 22593 adds 5-minute increments for everything under a half-hour to focus session length options.

Snap layouts

If you press the “Windows key + Z” keyboard shortcut to open Snap layouts, the layouts will now appear with numbers to make them easier to identify.

Windows Security

Windows 11 will now notify you that the Core isolation feature to protect the memory integrity is disabled, so you can turn it back on to protect your computer against malicious attacks.

Input

Microsoft Journal will now come pinned by default on the “Pen” menu. If you don’t have the app installed, it will be installed from the Microsoft Store if chosen on the Pen menu.

The ADLaM keyboard layout adds access to brackets and ADLaM Hamza. To access these:

Right Alt + \ will now input »
Right Alt + | will now input «
Right Alt + Shift + [ will now input {
Right Alt + Shift + ] will now input }
Ctrl + Shift + ; will now input the Hamza character

Also, the company updated the Pashto keyboard layout so that ې and ئ are now directly accessible on the keyboard.

General fixes for build 22593

In addition to the new features and improvements, Windows 11 build 22593 also ships with a bunch of improvements for the Taskbar, Start menu, Settings, File Explorer, and more.

Taskbar

Fixed an issue where app icons were unexpectedly animating from the upper left when launching a new app.

Improved the performance of rearranging taskbar icons.

Addressed an issue in the previous flight leading to duplicate app icons after closing and re-opening an app.

If you have a lot of apps open, the icons shouldn’t overlap the date and time on your secondary monitors anymore.

The taskbar will no longer disappear when you enter search over a full-screen window.

Fixed an issue that was causing icon spacing to invert so that it was large when it should be small and vice versa when switching in and out of the tablet-optimized taskbar.

The tablet-optimized taskbar will now stay visible over full-screen apps when expanded and only hide when you collapse it.

If you have multiple keyboards for your current language, the input indicator will now only show one row of text when the tablet-optimized taskbar is in a collapsed state, so that it doesn’t get clipped.

Fixed a crash that was causing the taskbar to get stuck in the tablet-optimized taskbar view.

Settings will now remember your taskbar’s auto-hide setting more consistently.

Mitigated an issue where some app icons in the system tray which were expected to flash weren’t doing that.

Fixed an issue causing system tray icons to get stuck there even after you closed the application.

Made a fix for an issue where some mouse move events weren’t being passed to apps for icons in the system tray.

Addressed an issue leading to a decrease in Notification Center launch reliability in recent flights.

Mitigated an issue causing the Notification Center and its context to sometimes show the wrong color text for the system’s theme, making it unreadable.

Updated the names of some of the months in the Simplified and Traditional Chinese lunar calendar to be more accurate.

Start menu

Updated the design of the folders in Start so that they’re a little bigger, making it easier to see the app icons highlighted within the folder without having to open it.

Fixed an issue where if you created a folder in Start in the same position as a deleted folder, it would show the old name.

If you tab into naming a folder in Start with your keyboard, you can now tab back out instead of having to hit Esc.

Fixed an issue where when using the keyboard to select options following WIN + X didn’t work. And dismissing WIN + X should be more consistent now.

Fixed an issue where the prompt wasn’t coming to the front when launching Windows Terminal as an admin from Start’s right-click context menu (WIN + X).

The search icon in the taskbar should no longer unexpectedly flash when closing the Start menu.

Search

Made some improvements to help with the search indexer thread and memory usage for users with a very high number of indexed items.

Fixed an issue impacting search reliability (where you would type into the search window or Start and nothing would happen) in recent flights.

Made another fix to help address an issue where the search searches flyout could get stuck on the screen in a transparent area.

File Explorer

Improved performance of loading Home in File Explorer.

Fixed a scaling issue where the context menu could be an unexpected size when invoking it on systems with mixed DPI monitors.

Addressed an issue where the Show More Options entry in the context menu wasn’t working for items in File Explorer’s navigation pane (for example, if you were to right-click on This PC).

Did some work to help reduce the chance you will see “Loading” for app entries in the context menu.

Fixed an issue that was causing the “Open in Windows Terminal” context menu option to be unexpectedly missing for secondary users in some cases.

Opening suggested results shown while entering search terms in File Explorer’s search box should now work as expected.

Mitigated an underlying issue leading to the address bar being inaccessible in certain cases.

Mitigated an issue leading to increased launch time for certain file types in the previous flight.

Fixed a few more issues impacting explorer.exe reliability in recent release.

Widgets

Fixed the issue where sometimes when pinning from the Feed, the pinned widget is placed at the top instead of below other pinned widgets.

Fixed the issue where after rearranging widgets in the widgets board, some users experience problems with widgets in the pinned section rendering incorrectly.

Input

Fixed an issue preventing several input UI surfaces from displaying the following explorer.exe crashes in recent flights – this included the emoji panel, candidate windows, clipboard history, and the touch keyboard.

Mitigated an issue where Narrator was silent when launching the emoji panel in certain cases, for example, if the search box wasn’t displayed.

Fixed an issue that was causing custom theme changes in Settings > Personalization > Text input to not save properly sometimes.

Addressed a few more color issues with the touch keyboard, including where after changing from dark to light mode, the touch keyboard might end up with a mix of dark and light.

Updated the touch keyboard button so that pressing it always shows the touch keyboard, rather than hiding it if it’s visible.

Returned the Backspace key to the touch keyboard’s small layout when using Chinese (Traditional).

Improved reliability of launching the touch keyboard on the login screen.

You should be able to use the Japanese IME’s context menu on the login screen to change conversion mode now.

Fixed an issue where the Chinese (Traditional) IMEs were only showing 5 suggested associated phrases when they should have been showing 9.

Fixed an issue where if you’d set a custom background image under Settings > Personalization > Text Input, the preview wouldn’t show how it looked in the candidate window for Chinese (Simplified).

Addressed a rendering issue with the corners of the IME toolbar.

Fixed an issue where the IME toolbar wasn’t hiding and showing correctly when using the previous version of the Japanese IME.

Improved voice typing reliability.

Updated voice typing error message “Voice typing is limited on this app” to be “Some voice typing features might not work in this app”, so it’s a little clearer than basic voice typing will still work.

Fixed an issue causing some voice typing commands not to work, for example, “scratch that” (刮除它) in Chinese (Simplified).

Addressed an issue where the setting “Disable Touch while using Pen” under Settings > Bluetooth & Devices > Pen & Windows Ink would arbitrarily not take effect sometimes on first boot in recent flights.

Fixed an issue causing the Get-InstalledLanguage and Install-Language PowerShell commands to unexpectedly fail with error 0x8007023E for some languages.

Settings

If keyboard focus is on the chevron for a collapsible region on a Settings page, for example, the Snap windows section under System > Multitasking, you can now use the left and right arrows to expand and collapse the area.

Fixed an issue impacting the reliability of System > Power & Battery.

When using the custom color picker on Personalization > Colors now, it should appear centered in the window frame and not randomly off to the side.

Setting your background image fit to “fit” under Personalization > Background should no longer cause the background image preview to become a solid color.

Addressed another issue that could cause Windows Spotlight to unexpectedly stop updating for a prolonged period of time.

Fixed an issue that was causing the Settings app to crash when going to focus settings.

Fixed an issue that was letting keyboard focus will go to elements in the contrast theme previews in Accessibility > Contrast Themes that you couldn’t interact with.

Fixed an issue where leaving the contrast themes editor in Settings by selecting the breadcrumbs would clear the dropdown selection, but the buttons were still acting as if you had a theme selected.

Updated the text description for voice typing under Accessibility > Speech to make more sense when using the Japanese display language.

Addressed an issue that was preventing Quick Settings from launching with its new touch gesture.

Quick Settings will now show the correct icon to represent your audio output device again.

Windowing

Mitigated an issue that could lead to explorer.exe crashes when using ALT + Tab.

Fixed an issue where the keyboard focus outline in ALT + Tab sometimes was smaller than the displayed thumbnail.

Addressed an underlying DWM issue that was leading to crashes when using touch gestures from the sides of the screen.

Fixed a DWM crash when rotating the screen.

Mitigated an issue leading to some lag when resizing two apps snapped side by side in certain cases.

Fixed an issue where snap assist could unexpectedly dismiss if the initial window wouldn’t fit into the selected zone size. Now we resize the snap assist regions accordingly when the minimum window size of the initial snapped window is larger than the selected zone.

If you invoke Task View with touch, the close buttons should no longer overlap with the window titles.

Hovering your mouse over the tooltip with the Desktop’s name will no longer unexpectedly make the Desktops flyout dismiss.

Using drag and drop to reorder your Desktops via the Desktop flyout should no longer leave a thumbnail of the Desktop you moved stuck on the screen.

Voice access

Fixed a crash that was impacting voice access reliability.

Addressed an issue that was preventing voice access’s speech models from downloading correctly.

Live captions

Addressed an underlying issue leading to live captions showing a download error, even though the download had actually been completed successfully.

Live captions will now remember your chosen settings for position across sessions.

Mitigated an issue where the position of the live caption changed to floating when entering full screen, but the settings incorrectly showed the last position still.

Removed the live captions notification about audio playing from multiple apps as it was popping up repeatedly during usage.

The border of the live captions window will now match the style of all other borders in contrast themes.

Narrator

Dixed the issue that was causing natural voices to break up sporadically in recent builds.

Narrator will now read out the word minutes with the duration times listed in Settings for focus options.

Fixed an issue that was causing the Narrator to read dialog buttons incorrectly in scan mode.

Task Manager

Removed backplate (colored square) from UWP app icons were displayed in Task Manager.

Mitigated an issue where one side of the View button did not appear to do anything.

Fixed an issue that was causing the real-time update speed to get set to Paused on its own. Please note, if you were impacted by this, you will need to make a one-time change to set the setting back to your preferred update speed after upgrading to this build.

Other fixes

Mitigated an issue that was leading to a black (albeit interactable) screen when playing certain full-screen games with Auto HDR enabled.

Fixed a memory leak in Connected Devices Platform User Service.

The volume and brightness flyouts you get when using your hardware keys will no longer show a focus window outline on top of them.

If WIN + Alt + K is pressed when a supported app isn’t running, the pop-up text displayed will now say “No supported apps in use for mic mute”, instead of “Mic mute unavailable”, so it’s clearer.

Addressed an issue that was leading to unexpected errors being displayed in Event Viewer when conhost.exe was activated.

Install Windows 11 build 22593

If you want to download and install the Windows 11 build 22593, you need to enroll your device in the Beta Channel or Dev Channel using the “Windows Insider Program” settings from the “Update & Security” section.

Once you enroll the computer in the program, you can download build 22593 from the “Windows Update” settings by clicking the Check for Updates button. However, you will need a device that meets the minimum system requirements to receive the update if you are new to the Windows Insider Program.

If you have a device in the Beta Channel, and you prefer not to install previews of version 22H2, it’s now the time to go to Settings > Windows Update > Windows Insider Program, and select the “Choose your Insider settings” and change the channel to Release Preview.