We’re All Beta Testers Now (Premium)

For obvious reasons, I've been closely tracking how and when Microsoft updates Windows 11. And just last week, I wrote up how the software giant has issued new Windows 11 features every month since last September save one, in January. Explaining how Microsoft transitioned from "one feature update per year" to multiple new features every month is beyond my brain capacity right now, but one of the major changes it instituted to streamline this monthly outlay was formally revealed in late March: it now releases a preview version of each monthly update two weeks prior to the mainstream release.

There's a lot of language to wade through here, but here's the short version: Microsoft has long used a week-based system for scheduling software updates. Week B, the second week of a given month, is the week in which Patch Tuesday occurs, and that is when Microsoft issues "mandatory cumulative updates" for Windows and other systems, updates that can include both feature and security updates. Under the new system, Week D, the fourth week of the month, is now when Microsoft ships "optional non-security preview releases." These are preview versions of the next month's mandatory cumulative updates, and because they are optional, one needs to manually find and download them.

Keeping track of this stuff is hard enough, but the most recent optional non-security preview release, which Microsoft shipped in Week C last month, on April 25, includes a payload that I don't feel was adequately explained, most likely on purpose. It arrives in the form of a new toggle in Windows Update called "Get the latest updates as soon as they're available." And there are literally three different places to find out more about this: the Microsoft Support document describing this update, a separate Microsoft Support document describing this feature, and a third Microsoft Support document about continuous innovation, Microsoft's new name for "Windows as a Service."

And yikes.

Among the many ways in which Microsoft can ship software code to its Windows 11-using customers is a technology called Controlled Feature Rollout (CFR). This technology is already being used in the Microsoft Edge Insider Program and the Windows Insider Program, and now it's moving into what I'll call "stable," meaning the non-preview, supported version(s) of Windows 11 that are out in the world and used by hundreds of millions of mainstream users.

CFR is designed to roll out new features to the user base gradually, and only after each feature has "completed standard quality, reliability, and compliance tests and [Microsoft has] determined that the feature is at ship quality." When that's true, it will be rolled out to a "small randomly selected subset" of users. As feedback and telemetry come in and hopefully validates Microsoft's belief that the feature in question is of high enough quality, the size of the subset of users who receive the feature grows, is further validated, and then grows agai...