windows ux

Microsoft’s Windows design lead said on June 3, 2026, that Windows 11 context menus are being reworked to become faster, simpler by default, and configurable around the actions people use most. That is a small sentence with a long shadow. The right-click menu was supposed to be one of Windows...

Microsoft has quietly given Windows users a tiny but telling reminder of how platform wars are won: not always by radical reinvention, but by borrowing the right habits from the other side. Scott Hanselman’s PeekDesktop takes a familiar macOS-style desktop interaction and brings it to Windows in...

Microsoft’s Clippy still matters because it captures a recurring truth about software design: when an assistant is too eager, too generic, and too visible, users stop seeing help and start seeing interference. A quarter-century after Microsoft disabled the paperclip by default in Office, the...

Microsoft’s long-simmering complaint about bloated right-click menus may finally get a meaningful fix: recent developer previews and a WinUI community demonstration show a split context menu approach that surfaces a single sensible default action for a file type while tucking related but less...

Google’s experimental Windows app aims to remove the friction of switching windows to look something up — a floating, Spotlight‑like search bar you summon with Alt + Space that can search local files, installed apps, Google Drive, and the web, and that folds in Google Lens and the company’s AI...

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 Insider preview builds quietly add a one‑click internet speed‑test shortcut to the taskbar network flyout — but the shortcut simply opens Bing’s web‑based speed test rather than running a native, offline measurement — and the same builds also include a subtle but...

Windows 11’s 24H2 is now shipping support for Emoji 16.0 — but there’s a catch: the system emoji panel doesn’t yet expose the new icons, and rendering remains inconsistent across apps and web services. What looks like a late-but-welcome Unicode update has instead exposed a long-standing Windows...

Microsoft’s quiet experiment with a new search experience for Bing — an “AI Search” or Copilot Search mode that replaces traditional blue links with a summary-first interface — is more than a cosmetic tweak; it’s a strategic bet that could reshape search behavior, publisher economics, and the...

Microsoft has quietly rolled out a redesigned right‑click menu for Notepad in Windows 11, bringing the long-familiar text editor into alignment with the modern, streamlined context‑menu style that Microsoft has been applying across the OS. rty has long been defined by speed, simplicity, and...