Windows 11 Insider build 22623.746 improves the system tray experience

Microsoft is rolling out a second update for Windows Insiders enrolled in the Beta channel, after build 22623.741 began rolling out earlier in the week. This time, it's Windows 11 build 22623.746 (as well as build 22621.743) that's being made available, and it actually comes with a significant improvement for Insiders who have the new taskbar and system tray experience enabled, which is only a subset of users.

If you happen to be in that group, though, you'll be happy to know that Microsoft is preliminarily enabling support for re-arranging the icons in the system tray once again. The new system tray experience that began being tested with build 22623.730 has an issue that prevented this feature from working, which is why it didn't make it to the initial release of Windows 11 version 22H2, despite being tested earlier in the year.

Now, Microsoft seems to be laser-focused on addressing these problems to roll out the new experience in the coming months. The company says further refinements are still coming to the new system tray experience, so you might still have some issues.

Aside from that change, Windows 11 build 22623.746 comes with a couple of fixes. For users with the new system tray experience who have the taskbar set to auto-hide, you should no longer see the taskbar disappear when you right-click an icon in the system tray. And for those testing the new tablet-optimized taskbar, Microsoft also fixed an issue where the touch gesture to open the Start menu might not follow your finger.

There are also a couple of fixes that apply to both build 22621.746 and 22623.746, enabling the ms-appinstaller URI to work for the DesktopAppInstaller, and fixing an issues with Windows Search indexing being unusually slow.

Despite all those fixes, there are still a few known issues in these builds, particularly for users with the new tablet-optimized taskbar and system tray experiences. You can find those below:

Known issues in Windows 11 builds 22623.746 and 22621.746

[General]

We’re looking into reports that audio stopped working for some Insiders in recent Beta Channel builds.

[Tablet-optimized taskbar]

The taskbar sometimes flashes when transitioning between desktop posture and tablet posture.
The taskbar takes longer than expected to transition to the touch-optimized version when switching between desktop posture and tablet posture.
When using the bottom right edge gesture to see Quick Settings, the taskbar sometimes stays stuck in the expanded state, instead of dismissing to collapsed state.

[System Tray Updates]

[NEW] Dragging the system tray icons may cause explorer.exe to crash for some Insiders.

As per usual, you can get grab the latest update by going into the Settings app and checking for updates, but it should also install automatically sooner than later. We should see these new experiences come to the general public at some point in the next few months.

Source: Microsoft