João has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem. I also love all things tech and videogames, especially Nintendo, which he's always happy to talk about.
Prior to joining XDA in 2021, he worked at Neowin: https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/jo%C3%A3o-carrasqueira/
Microsoft is adding a new Gallery view to the File Explorer on Windows 11, starting with Windows Insiders in the Dev channel. Microsoft today began rolling out Windows 11 build 23435 for Dev channel Insiders, containing a handful of improvements aside from the new gallery view.
The new Gallery view in File Explorer
The big highlight of this build is definitely the Gallery view in File Explorer, which is meant to make it easier to view all your photos in File Explorer. This view shows you the same content you'd see by opening the Photos app, so it pulls content from multiple folders across your PC, and you can add or exclude sources so you see the files you want.
Source: Microsoft
Having this view built into the File Explorer makes it easier to browse these files when you want to send them to someone. That's especially true because this view is also available when using the Windows 11 file picker to upload or open a file in a given app.
As per usual, this new feature is only available to a subset of Insiders, so it doesn't really matter if you chose the Dev channel to get new features early — Microsoft only gives them to users when it wants to.
While there's no direct connection, this build also brings the WinUI 3-based File Explorer to the Dev channel. There aren't any UI changes as part of this change, it just changes the underlying foundation from the previous WinUI 2 version to the newer WinUI 3. If you have this new version, you'll see a pizza slice icon on the File Explorer toolbar. Again, this is only for select Insiders.
Presence sensing controls
The other notable addition with this build is privacy controls for presence sensing on compatible devices. Certain laptops nowadays come with presence sensors that can be used by specific apps to detect when you're in front of the computer and react accordingly. Microsoft added a presence sensing API to Windows 11 to make it easier for developers to create apps that leverage these sensors. With this update, you can control which apps can access these sensors using the Settings app.
Source: Microsoft
This feature made its debut earlier this week in other Insider channels.
Other changes
The bulk of the remaining changes are less interesting. Microsoft continues to experiment with the notification badges shown in the user menu inside Start, testing out different messages to be shown. Narrator has also been improved to work better with Traditional Chinese and the IME candidate window. Otherwise, the build includes the following fixes:
[Taskbar & System Tray]
Fixed a few explorer.exe crashes that were impacting taskbar reliability.
[Input]
Updated the TextInput/EnableTouchKeyboardAutoInvokeInDesktopMode MDM policy to allow “2” as a valid value to enforce showing the touch keyboard on tapping an edit control even when the hardware keyboard is attached.
[Settings]
Fixed an issue which was causing Settings crashes when navigating to various Windows Update related pages in the last couple flights.
[Live captions]
Fixed the issue that caused enhanced speech recognition support installed through the Language & Region settings page to require restarting live captions if you switch languages in the live captions Caption language menu on Arm64 devices.
Fixed the issue where you may not see install completion of “Enhanced speech recognition” (required by Live Captions) when adding a language through the Language & Region settings page, and language feature installation progress may become hidden.
[Task Manager]
Improved the performance of the expand all / collapse all View options on the Processes page.
[Accessibility]
Updated Narrator’s default for “Context level for buttons and controls” to “3 – Immediate content name and type.”
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There are some known issues, too, which you can find below:
[Search on the Taskbar]
There is an issue where some people may not see the search box on the taskbar and/or the settings to adjust the search box experience on the taskbar after updating to Build 23403. We are aware of the issue, and we are working on a fix.
[File Explorer]
Insiders who have Gallery in File Explorer will see the following issues:
[NEW] Gallery may require clicking twice on the node in the navigation pane for initial load.
[NEW] Live updates (including filtering) are currently disabled and require using the Refresh button as a workaround.
[NEW] Thumbnail loading performance for dehydrated cloud files and memory usage in large collections are known issues we are focused on improving. Please capture Performance traces in Feedback Hub for any performance-related issues. Rebuilding your Indexer can help if thumbnails are missing for cloud files; Search for “Indexing Options” and look in Advanced settings to find the rebuild tool.
[NEW] Photos from OneDrive for Business currently must be hydrated to work properly.
[NEW] Some file types (e.g., HEIC) might not be rendered correctly or performantly.
Insiders who have access keys in File Explorer will see the following issues:
Access keys will appear inconsistently if no button is pressed. Pressing a button will cause them to reappear.
Shift + Right click on a file or folder is not opening “Show more options”.
Insiders will have issues with the following commands on recommended files in File Explorer:
Clicking on the Share command will currently bring up the Windows share sheet (non-OneDrive).
[Live captions]
[NEW] Live captions will crash on first launch due to an issue impacting registry data retrieval. A new fix is expected very soon.
Certain languages shown on the Language & Region settings page will indicate speech recognition support (e.g., Korean) but don’t yet have support for live captions.
Captioning performance may be degraded in non-English languages and missing out-of-language filtering in non-English (United States) languages which means that incorrect captions will be shown for speech not in the caption language.
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As usual, if you're enrolled in the Dev channel of the Windows Insider program, this build will be installed automatically sooner or later.
