Windows Insider Beta Channel Gets a New Copilot Hover Experience

Microsoft issued a new Windows 11 build to Windows Insiders in the Beta channel today, but there’s only one new feature and it’s experimental.

As a reminder, anyone with a PC enrolled in the Beta channel can get whatever new features and fixes Microsoft issues with each build: Just enable the option “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available.” This is an improvement over the previous A/B testing nonsense that Beta channel members had to deal with, but note that Microsoft is still using Controlled Feature Rollout (CFR) technology to roll out some updates and fixes. So you won’t necessarily see everything new right away.

Anyway. As noted, there is only one new feature in this build, 22635.3276: Microsoft is experimenting with a new hover experience for Copilot in Windows, and it works much like the default hover experience with Widgets: If you mouse over the Copilot icon the Taskbar, the Copilot sidebar will open. (In stable, you have to click the icon to open Copilot.) The only difference is that if you don’t interact with Copilot, the sidebar will close.

Two caveats to this feature. It “will begin rolling out slowly over the next few weeks to Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel.” And Copilot is, of course, only available in North America, the United Kingdom, and parts of Asia and South America. So there are two levels of difficulty there.

In addition to this one change, build 22635.3276 also includes fixes for issues in Nearby Sharing, Task Manager, and Search. Nothing major. But Microsoft is also working on a fix for a major new crash-causing bug in File Explorer, and that is a big deal: No word yet on when that will be fixed.