Windows 11’s preview builds are getting more experimental in 2022

Enlarge / The Windows Insider program's new logo. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows 11 will be getting a significant new feature update sometime this month, and Microsoft is taking the opportunity to make some changes to its Windows Insider public beta program. The company outlined its plans in a blog post, along with a new logo (it looks like people but also hearts, neat).

Microsoft's plans primarily impact the Dev channel, which will be "a place to incubate new ideas" but will more importantly be a place where Microsoft tests competing versions of features to see which one gets the best response. Some of the features might make it into the consumer version of Windows soon, some might make it eventually, and some may disappear never to be seen or heard from again.

For context, the Insider Preview program has three channels, each of which represents a different stage of Windows development. The Dev channel is updated frequently and previews not-always-stable, not-always-finished versions of new fixes and features, some of which are uncovered by external developers before Microsoft is ready to talk about them. The Beta channel is where near-final versions of features are tested before being tweaked for public release, and the Release Preview channel generally gets the exact same builds of Windows that are released to the general public a few days or weeks before everyone else.

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