Microsoft is making important changes to the Windows 10X Start menu. The software maker has just unveiled Windows 10X, a new variant of Windows 10 designed to work on foldable, dual-screen devices coming to the future, including the Surface Neo. There have been a number of changes to the operating system to make it more user-friendly, but the Start menu is perhaps the most obvious.
Microsoft is scrapping its Live Tiles, the animated and inverted icons of Windows Phone days, in favor of a more simplified look. The Windows 10X Start menu includes apps you can pin locally and a list of recent documents. It looks more like a task launcher than what exists in Windows 10 today.
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It’s not surprising to see a new Start menu on this variant of Windows 10. Microsoft accidentally revealed this exact change to the Start menu earlier this year, after an internal version of Windows 10 was released in error.
Dynamic thumbnails were originally part of Windows Phone, and Microsoft added them to Windows 8 to encourage developers to build apps that update the information displayed there. They’re designed to be “at a glance and go” so you can quickly look at the front of a phone and see information, but that doesn’t translate well in Windows 10’s Start menu and not all apps even fully support animated tiles.
It’s not clear if the regular version of Windows 10 will also be updated to include some of these changes to the Windows 10X Start menu, but it’s clear that Microsoft no longer sees dynamic thumbnails as part of its Windows future .
