Windows 10’s Start menu could have a nifty change in the pipeline

Microsoft has apparently sneaked in a change to the Start menu for Windows 10 ‘skip ahead’ testers – who are now working with the next big update due to land in the first half of 2019 – and it seems the plan is to change the menu in a simple but interesting way.

The change is that when you hover the mouse pointer over an icon in the left-hand pane of the Start menu, the menu in question is displayed after a slight delay of a split second – as opposed to just a tooltip telling you what the icon is, which is what pops up currently.

Now, if you’re a skip ahead tester and the Start menu doesn’t seem any different to you, that’s because at the moment Microsoft is only trialing this change with a limited number of folks.

Sample set

In other words, the software giant wants to see how the new menu resonates with that small group, before potentially introducing it across the board in a future build for skip ahead testers. So, hold tight and you may see this eventually (either that, or Microsoft will abandon it as a bad idea, which is obviously a possibility).

It may be a relatively minor change, but it’s interesting to see nonetheless. It's also of note because there weren’t supposed to be any changes introduced with the skip ahead build 18204 (which, last week, was forked from build 17723, the Redstone 5 update due to arrive later this year).

The big change with both these latest preview builds is that Microsoft has introduced smart machine learning tech to attempt to judge when’s the best time to fire up and install Windows updates (to avoid interrupting or otherwise inconveniencing the user, and we’ve certainly witnessed complaints of this happening in the past).