New Windows 11 Insider Builds Bring Facebook Widget and More

Microsoft has just released a trio of new Windows 11 Insider builds for testers on the Canary, Dev, and Beta channels. The main feature that’s available for testing on all three channels is a Facebook widget, which will become available after installing the Facebook app from the Microsoft Store.

This new Facebook widget will allow users to see their notifications right from the widget board. A widget for the separate Facebook Messenger app has been available for quite some time, and so far Meta and Spotify are the only two big companies to offer third-party widgets on Windows 11.

There’s not much else to say about the Windows 11 Insider build 25357 for Canary channel testers, except that it brings the new volume mixer experience in Quick Settings to all Insiders. Similarly, the builds 22621.1690 and 22624.1690 for the Beta channel only come with two specific changes: A rebranding of the “Recommended” section in the Start Menu to “For you” for select Insiders, as well as new suggestions to add a recovery email address or phone number for your Microsoft account in the Settings app.

The Windows 11 Insider build 23451 for Dev Channel testers includes a lot more changes, though. The first one is a modernized details pane in File Explorer, which displays more contextual information about files. This new details pane will only roll out to a subset of Insiders on the Dev channel today.

This build also adds suggested websites based on your browsing history in the Recommended section of the Start Menu. Microsoft already tested this with Insiders last fall, but the suggestions weren’t personalized back then. Again, this feature is only available for select Insiders, and it requires testers to opt into sharing browsing data with Microsoft.

Lastly, the Windows 11 Insider build 23451 also includes the updated widgets picker that made its debut in the build 25352 last week. The animated icons for widgets on the taskbar that previously shipped on the Canary and Beta channel are also rolling out to the Dev channel today.

That’s it for the main changes included in today’s builds for Windows Insiders. We invite you to check out the different blog posts for more details about bug fixes and known issues for each build, though the release notes for the Canary channel build offers no detailed information about that.