Microsoft has treated some of Windows Insiders’ brave Dev Channel computers with the long-awaited Tabbed File Explorer.
“We’re starting to implement this feature, so it’s not yet available to all development channel insiders,” the software giant said.
The Register was one of the lucky ones and we have to praise Microsoft for the implementation (as it is overdue). The goal of the feature is to allow users to work in more than one location at a time in File Explorer using tabs in the title bar.
The feature can be found in compilation 25136. Microsoft has also updated the left navigation panel for easy access to frequently used folders, as well as general cleaning. The “This Computer” folder is now a physical resource, while known Windows folders (such as Documents and Images) have been moved elsewhere.
“We’d love to hear your feedback on what tab features you’d like to see below,” the Insider team said. We’ll suggest some consistency: turn on Microsoft Edge, for example, and the tab paradigm is very different. Tab overloading results in many small tabs, while File Explorer and Windows Terminal adopt a minimum width with arrows to scroll left and right tabs.
Microsoft’s obsession with widgets also continues in this compilation. In addition to the weather, users can also receive live updates from sports and financial widgets, along with breaking news alerts.
In addition to the usual set of fixes (including one to deal with a freeze after a user issues a wsl-shutdown command), Microsoft has updated Notepad and Media Player.
The former has received performance improvements when it comes to large blocks of text and native Arm64 support. We had to go to the Microsoft Store to download the update, which is available on all channels, and we saw that the architecture changed from x64 to ARM64 in Task Manager. The latter, which is only Dev Channel, has finally added the ability to sort songs and albums into a collection by added date.
As if to emphasize that all this is very much at the forefront, Microsoft has warned that Surface Pro X users will have a black screen when trying to go out of hibernation and will have to go through a boot cycle to recover the life of their slab. The recommendation for these users is to skip this build. ®