Microsoft bids farewell to Windows 8-era brightness and volume indicators in the latest...

[Humza]

Bottom line: Microsoft continues to modernize Windows components, aligning them aesthetically with its latest OS’ design language, alongside making other under-the-hood fixes and improvements. In the Insider Preview Build 22533 for Windows 11, these design changes are reflected in the new hardware indicators for brightness, volume, airplane mode and camera. The preview also brings small updates for the taskbar, WinX menu, and Microsoft’s Your Phone app.

The rounded corners treatment is coming to Windows 11’s hardware indicators, replacing the Windows 8-era vertical black bar for controlling things like volume and brightness that we've been used to for almost a decade.

Included in Microsoft’s latest Insider Preview, the modernized indicator removes the numerical value for added minimalism and now appears horizontally just above the Taskbar. The updated look for these controls honors OS dark/light modes and now closely matches their appearance under the Quick Settings panel.

The preview build also allows users to uninstall the default Clock app and lets them search and/or pin Windows 11’s ‘Voice access’ accessibility feature to the taskbar or Start for easily interacting with the OS through voice commands.

A more subtle change involves the WinX menu (Win + X), where the “Apps & Features” label has been renamed to “Installed apps.” Additionally, Microsoft has updated the "in-progress" calls window for its Your Phone app with new icons, fonts, and UI, and also included over a dozen fixes in this preview build.

Bug fixes in this build target the taskbar, general system stability, windowing, input, as well as the Photos and Settings app. Expectedly, there are also several issues with these components that Microsoft has acknowledged. Insiders may experience glitches when using the Search function or while switching input methods. Moreover, the signal strength of available Wi-Fi networks might be inaccurate, and the widgets feature can misbehave when aligning the taskbar or when using multiple displays.

There's currently no time frame on when the aforementioned design changes and fixes on the dev channel will make it to the public release, but it could end up as part of a Windows 11 feature update that's planned for the second half of this year.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/92978-microsoft-bids-farewell-windows-8-era-brightness-volume.html

 

[psycros]

"Included in Microsoft’s latest Insider Preview, the modernized indicator removes the numerical value for added minimalism and now appears horizontally just above the Taskbar."

Unbelievable. Its one thing for companies to be getting rid of language in order to save costs of localization, which is incredibly stupid in and of itself, but dropping numbers is beyond imbecilic. Microsoft: 40 years of copying the worst everyone else has to offer.

 

[R00sT3R]

Amazing to think that MS has to employ thousands of people, to come up with this type of cosmetic fluff.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

All this, and yet the old control panel is still necessary, hiding the weather and news app is still a PITA, and the UI is still a jumbled mess.

Thanks for reaffirming my move to mint, MS.

 

[aMerkuri]

Bring brightness slider for external monitors with DCC/CI, please.

 

[Sausagemeat]

I don’t want the volume indicator to move and I use the numbers to know what to set it too so that the explosions in games I play don’t wake up my housemates. I passionately despise MS at this point, they break everything from Windows to Halo, even Minecraft!

Yet we have no choice but to use this wreckage of an operating system to play games on. I literally own just one windows machine, it exists primarily to play games on and nothing else. All my other tech is Apple based now and it’s massively superior.

 

[Fox God Records]

Huh.

To think, I was upset that my i5-6500 wasn't able to "upgrade" to WIN11. I'm looking like a frickin' genius at this point.

/*waiting for WIN12*/

 

[RadaSHV]

Huh.

To think, I was upset that my i5-6500 wasn't able to "upgrade" to WIN11. I'm looking like a frickin' genius at this point.

/*waiting for WIN12*/

I'm able to install Windows 11 on my i7 5820K

 

[Fox God Records]

I'm able to install Windows 11 on my i7 5820K

Oh, I could install it if I really wanted to. But I would like to keep the ability to one-click update my machine.

 

[Rdmetz]

All this, and yet the old control panel is still necessary, hiding the weather and news app is still a PITA, and the UI is still a jumbled mess.

Thanks for reaffirming my move to mint, MS.

Installed explorerpatcher and open shell and I'm totally fine with windows 11 it's literally the best of 11 10 and 7 all in one environment and I don't have to go through the hell I watched when linus and his co-host showed what it's actually like to try and main Linux.

 

[Rdmetz]

All this, and yet the old control panel is still necessary, hiding the weather and news app is still a PITA, and the UI is still a jumbled mess.

Thanks for reaffirming my move to mint, MS.

ExplorerPatcher does everything you need to make the windows 11 Taskbar a proper working one just like 10 add in open shell and you got the what best of all of the windows generations.