Microsoft recently announced many of the big news that will come to Windows 11 with its first update, one that is expected in the fall of 2022. Among those news was the possibility of create folders in the Start Menu to include various application icons in themsomething that can be done in Windows 10.
It’s a pretty useful feature that’s been on the Insider Program Dev channel for several weeks, and just got a little better with the option to label the folders in a way that is very reminiscent of iPadOS.
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One of the main criticisms of the new Start Menu in Windows 11 is lack of customization and wasted space. By default, the most used apps and the most recent documents are pinned. If you don’t want to see recent documents, you can remove them from there, but the space isn’t filled with more icons, it’s just wasted white space.
The menu is fixed, it cannot be expanded like the one in Windows 10, it does not show access to system folders like always, it is something that you must activate manually from the Settings. And, despite looking better (in my opinion) with the new icons and not with tiles, we can not control everything that goes there, nor create folders to have more valuable access at hand.
All of this has been fixed in the preview builds of the Insider Program. App icons can now be displayed throughout the menu, folders can be created, and those folders can be renamed. The process is almost exactly like what we do when creating folders on the screen of an iOS or Android mobile device.
The feeling that it has given me is one of being more similar to what an iPad offers than to what Windows 10 itself offers. These types of small changes are part of those details that Microsoft neglected so much with the initial launch and that little by little they seem to be taking more into account.
The next version of Windows 11 looks like one that will be much more worth installing, it even seems that it will include the long-awaited tabs in File Explorer. It’s even possible that these kinds of system quality-of-life improvements will come sooner, after all, Windows 11 has been receiving small new features alongside its recent cumulative updates.