The Little Improvements in Windows 11 That No One is Talking About (Premium)

In writing the Windows 11 Field Guide, I came across something unexpected: Microsoft has fixed some of the most troubling issues with Windows 10. And not only did it never tell anyone, but no one seems to have even noticed.

I think I can explain why.

In Microsoft’s case, highlighting these specific positive changes it made in Windows 11 would only draw attention to the fact that Windows 10 was (and still is) serving up users a regular heaping portion of crap.

And in the case of reviewers, analysts, and users, Windows 11 presents enough issues—the arbitrary hardware requirements and the insane Microsoft account/Internet requirements chief among them—that its critics simply have bigger fish to fry. It’s hard to notice or even care about the small things when there are bigger and more obvious issues.

But writing these books, as I do, forces me to examine every nook and cranny in Windows. And writing a mostly new book, like the Windows 11 Field Guide, requires me to look at what I wrote before and ensure that the new book covers everything important. It’s not a true superset: yes, there is new information and content in the new book, as you might expect, lots of it. But I’m also trying to cull content that is less important or necessary. And, of course, some content is no longer relevant: there are features in Windows 10 that are no longer available in Windows 11. Like live tiles in the Start menu.

While I’m trying to write most of the new book from scratch, there is obviously content from the Windows 10 Field Guide that needs to come forward and be adapted for the new system. There are various reasons for this, but for the topic at hand, it’s simple enough: it would be tedious and error-prone to start over with this content, and I want to get it right.

The content in question is a section in the Personalize chapter from the previous book. There’s no Personalize chapter in the new book. Instead, I’ve split that content into various other chapters. You can learn about customizing the Desktop in the Desktop chapter now, for example. And there are new chapters like customizing privacy settings (which is also a complex and tedious thing to rewrite).

The new chapter in question was called Eliminate the Biggest Windows 11 Annoyances. And I write was there because there’s no need for it anymore. In the Windows 10 Field Guide, this was how I opened the Personalize chapter because the settings changes I suggest there are so important: Microsoft, as noted, bogs down Windows 10 with an astonishing amount of crap and other interruptions, and I don’t want readers to miss out on disabling it all.

Naturally, I assume all or most of the content from that section would apply to Windows 11. And so I added that chapter to the table of contents, leaving it blank until I got to it. Which I did, yesterday. And imagine my surprise: most of that crap is not present in Windows 11 at all. And the few things that are, aren’t all that annoying. This is, perhaps, the rare example of Windows 11’s simplifications having no usability downsides.

So what are those examples?

Crapware. Windows 10 bundles a crazy collection of third-party crapware, the most obvious example being the Candy Crush titles we used to deal with. Yes, Windows 11 still has some third-party apps that many won’t want—Tik Tok is the obvious example—but most of the third-party app shortcuts (and app shortcut stubs) in the Windows 11 Start menu are at least innocuous, and nothing at all like the crapware that PC makers bundle. And they’re easy enough to remove if any do offend (as before).

Start menu advertising. Microsoft used to display a Suggested area at the top of the Windows 10 Start menu’s all apps list. But that list is not visible in the Windows 11 Start menu, so there are no ads to disrupt what you’re doing. And there’s no interface for disabling something that’s never there.

File Explorer advertising. Microsoft has displayed a wide range of house ads in the Windows 10 File Explorer, but this doesn’t happen in Windows 11. The option that enables this is still there, actually. But I’ve never seen an ad as I did in Windows 10.

There are some items left from the original list, features that are still present in Windows 11. And I do cover a few of these in the new book, where appropriate, but I don’t see any reason to give them a place or prominence or highlight them especially.

For example, there is still a “finish setting up your device”-type screen that will appear after you reboot after installing certain updates, like feature updates, but this can be useful. There is still lock screen advertising, usually for other Microsoft products and services like Microsoft Edge or the Microsoft Store, but I suspect most users don’t even know they’re there. And while Suggestion pop-up and Action Center spamming still happens in Windows 11 (though the new Notifications pane has replaced the notifications area of the Action Center), you can easily turn this off (as before).

The one that strikes me most is the quality of the app shortcuts in the default Start menu. I’m reminded of how the Widgets interface worked at first in Windows 11; it was full of celebrity bikini stories and other nonsense at first. But today, it’s not horrible. I still don’t use it, of course. But Widgets now displays what I’d call actual news stories, mostly from credible sources. It’s a win.

The change I point out here is no cause for a huge celebration, I guess. But this stuff was toned down enough that I won’t need that chapter in the new book. And that’s at least interesting.

I will leave this with one caveat: it’s possible that some version of these missing “features” will return to Windows 11 in the future, of course. The Start menu is all-new, for example, and I’m sure Microsoft is examining how it can advertise there too. And we could see OneDrive ads pop up in File Explorer someday, as the option is still available.

So I’ll cross my fingers. But for now, at least, Windows 11 is just that tiny bit better than Windows 10. I appreciate that. And I wish I had noticed it earlier: it’s nice to balance out the bad with the good.