Back to basics: Microsoft tests overhauled Start menu in Windows 11 beta builds

Microsoft continues to tweak the Windows 11 UI in other ways as well. A beta build released to Windows Insider testers earlier this month enables “taskbar icon scaling,” which can shrink your taskbar icons to a smaller size to make more of them if you have enough apps pinned or opened at the same time (currently, the taskbar reclaims space first by shrinking the size of the search box and widget areas and then by tucking extra icons behind an ellipsis icon in an overflow area). Users can also choose to preserve the current taskbar behavior or use smaller icons all the time to gain some extra space.

The taskbar changes are likely to come to the standard public version of Windows 11 sooner rather than later, since Microsoft is testing them in its Windows Insider Beta channel—that’s the second-most-stable channel for new Windows 11 builds, in between the near-final Release Preview channel and the experimental Dev channel.

The Start menu changes could be officially announced in a future Windows 11 preview build, or they could never actually be enabled at all. These hidden Windows 11 changes often end up rolling out to the public—things like the Windows version of the Sudo command were initially discovered this way—but Microsoft occasionally tests things internally that don’t end up becoming part of the public version of Windows in the end.