- Microsoft has a start -up menu in tests
- This introduces new provisions for the list of all applications
- One of these provisions is a category view, and we have had Microsoft confirmation that it will not be possible to personalize this to your liking
We have just learned more about how Microsoft’s remained start -up menu will operate on arrival in Windows 11, and not everyone is satisfied with the new information broadcast here.
The latest Windows reports on a personalization item that does not become that some Windows 11 users hoped, and it concerns one of the new provisions introduced for the list of applications.
As you may remember, with the Redssiné Start menu – which is now in the Windows 11 test versions – the long list of applications installed on the PC can be defined on some more compact alternative provisions, one of which is a grid and the other a category view.
It is the latter that interests us here, by which applications are grouped into different categories such as games, productivity, creativity, companies, public services, etc. Each of these categories has a box in which up to four icons for the most commonly used applications appear, and the complete list of applications is inside if you open the category – which allows an easier way to locate the application you are looking for, rather than scrolling a long alphabetical list.
So what is the beef that was raised here? Windows has received Microsoft confirmation that it will not be possible to create your own types of categories.
Windows 11 will, of course, take decisions on how to classify applications and where they belong, but there are interesting and less than ideal shades, recovered by Windows later here.
Any application that Windows 11 is not sure in the “Other” category of one thing. In addition, if there are not three applications for a given category – because you do not have enough creativity applications installed on your machine, let’s say – then an application of wandering creativity (like paint) will be thrown into others.
Analysis: improved personalization could still be offered with a little luck
If Microsoft gave people the opportunity to make their own category files, they could have some discharge alternatives to other categories named so that the user can better remember the applications they contain.
However, with Windows 11 supervising the category allocation, it seems that Microsoft wants to keep a tight reduction on the groups that are present in this part of the interface. Unfortunately, it is not possible to move an application from one category to another, either (as Windows, the last one pointed out in the past), if you disagree with the place where it has been placed – and this last capacity is a more revealing gap here.
The new start menu remains in the tests, so Microsoft can make changes before its arrival in the finished version of Windows 11. This is quite possible, especially since Microsoft has (still) underlined how it listens to user comments in order to better inform the design of Windows 11, revision of the start menu included.
Thus, the simple fact of being able to drag and drop the icons between these categories is something that we can hope, in order to reclassify a given application – it is a fairly basic functionality, after all. We can possibly define our own categories, but for the moment, it seems that Microsoft adopts a rather rigid approach to personalization with this part of the menu.
Expect that this start-up treatment is one of the central pillars of Windows 11 25H2 when it appears later this year.
