Windows Insider Beta Channel Gets New Features While Canary Testers Move to Build 26200

The Windows Insider team is back today with two new Windows 11 preview builds for the Canary and Beta Channels. And the Canary channel is finally moving back to more unstable flights with today’s build 26200. This also means that Canary testers will no longer be able to switch to the Dev Channel after installing this build.

Despite the higher build number, the Windows 11 Canary build 26200 only brings minor changes to the Widgets board and the taskbar. The Widgets button, which now uses animated icons to notify users about updates, should now display a larger set of animated icons.

Moreover, for Insiders in the EU, Microsoft is now allowing developers to send notifications to the taskbar button to users who have set up multiple feeds in the Widget board. Developers can now create new feeds for the Widgets Board as an alternative to built-in the “Discover” feed, though to my knowledge, this hasn’t happened yet. Anyway, EU users are also getting a new option to enable or disable taskbar notifications from these individual feeds in settings for the Widgets board.

The Windows Insider team also acknowledged a known issue causing Copilot on Windows to auto-launch after resetting a PC. “We hope to have a fix for this issue soon and is unrelated to the auto-launching experience we tried out with Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels in early February which we stopped rolling out in March,” the Windows Insider team explained today

Moving on to the build 22635.3500 for Beta Channel testers, this one actually has more new features. For starters, Microsoft is starting to roll out the new Widgets board design with the left navigation bar that lets users switch between a full widgets experience and the integrated Discover dashboard with the MSN Start newsfeed. This change is currently only available for Insiders in the EU, and as I mentioned previously, Microsoft is now allowing developers to build other feeds for the Widgets Board that can send notifications to the Widgets button in the taskbar.

For Beta Channels testers who have enabled the “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available” toggle in Windows Update, Microsoft is also rolling out three new experiences today. The first one is a new account manager in the Start Menu that shows account settings and current benefits for users who are signed in on Windows 11 with a Microsoft account.

In the Settings app, Microsoft is adding a new Game Pass recommendation card on the Settings homepage. Yes, this is another “ad” for a Microsoft service on Windows 11, though the Windows Insider team emphasized that this card will only show up if you’re signed in with your Microsoft account and you “actively play games on your PC.”

Lastly, Insiders who use a Gmail address for their Microsoft account will now see an option to share content to that email address from the Windows share window. If you regularly send emails to yourself, this may be useful to you.

That’s it for the main changes coming to the Beta Channel today. The way Microsoft releases new features to specific channels doesn’t always make sense, and these days, the Canary Channel rarely gets new Windows 11 features first. However, things could change now that Microsoft has once again moved this Channel to a higher build number.