Microsoft will tweak the user interface and features of Windows 11 almost whenever it wants

Microsoft announced that Windows 11 will receive several major updates this month, and today these updates are available to install on most Windows 11 PCs. The full list includes previews of virtualized Android apps for Windows 11, new versions of Notepad and Media Player (the latest replaces Microsoft Groove) and several taskbar updates that add new features and restore a couple of old ones.

To get the taskbar improvements, you need to go to Windows Update and manually install the 2022-02 update preview; otherwise, you will receive it automatically within the next few weeks. Updates to the Media Player and Notepad apps will be downloaded through the Microsoft Store without any additional effort, unless you manually disable Microsoft Store app updates. And running Android apps on Windows 11 requires slightly higher system requirements than Windows 11 itself, including an 8th generation Intel Core i3 processor or later or an AMD Ryzen 3000-series processor or later, an SSD instead of a hard drive, 8 GB or more memory and virtualization support included in your PC firmware.

If you already knew what these updates were coming, the most interesting is near the end of the Microsoft blog post, where the company says it plans to keep adding new features to Windows 11 through “various update mechanisms.”The promised “continuous innovation”aligns with the company’s plans to make its preview builds of Windows 11 more experimental in 2022. It also signals an ongoing shift towards a more web browser model of small but frequent feature updates rather than containment. big change to serve updates once a year, like Microsoft used to do in the Windows 10 era.

That’s not to say that Windows 10 never made UI changes between servicing updates, especially since apps like Edge started getting updated independently of the rest of the operating system, but significant UI and feature changes still usually waited twice -annual major updates.

The downside, especially early on, was that these updates could be buggy and disruptive. Service Updates will likely continue to be where Microsoft makes major new additions and does more extensive work to update Windows fundamentals. But the company clearly sees no need to tie small quality-of-life improvements to new versions of Windows, which will require much more testing and validation.