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(Updated) Windows 10 Fall Creators Update Changelog: All New features in detail, Build number

October 21, 2017

Microsoft will start pushing Windows 10 Fall Creators update on the official release date of October 17. Windows 10 Build 16299.15 (10.0.16299.15) is the RTM build for Fall Creators update. You can read the complete and massive changelog for Fall Creators update below.

This changelog was first posted by Brandon from Microsoft Insider team and we have just done minor tweaks. Do let us know in comments if you see any discrepancies anywhere.

Fall Creators update download:

Microsoft will make ISO download link available for Windows 10 Fall Creators update tomorrow, October 17. You can also use Media Creation tool to either update your PC to Fall Creators update or create bootable USB for installing it on other devices. Check our tutorial here on how to update to Fall Creators update using Media creation tool.

OneDrive Files On-Demand

With OneDrive Files On-Demand, you can access all your files in the cloud without having to download them and use storage space on your device. All your files—even online-only files—can be seen in File Explorer and work just like every other file on your device. You’ll be able to open online-only files from within any desktop or Windows Store apps using the Windows file picker. And you’re covered in both your home and professional life since it works with your personal and work OneDrive, as well as your SharePoint Online team sites.

After enabling Files On-Demand in OneDrive, your files will have these statuses in File Explorer:

Online-only files

Online-only files don’t take up space on your computer. You see a cloud icon for each online-only file in File Explorer, but the file doesn’t download to your device until you open it. You can only open online-only files when your device is connected to the internet. However, you online files will always be visible in File Explorer even if you are offline.

Locally available files

When you open an online-only file, it downloads to your device and becomes a locally available file. You can open a locally available file anytime, even without Internet access. If you need more space, you can change the file back to online-only. Just right-click the file and select “Free up space.”

Always available files

Only files that you mark as “Always keep on this device” have the green circle with the white check mark. These files will always be available even when you’re offline. They are downloaded to your device and take up space.

Additionally, we wanted to make sure that our customers are in control of all file downloads from the cloud. When they use OneDrive Files On-Demand (or another cloud provider), and an app (like a photo editor) tries to download files that the customer has stored only in the cloud, we’ll show a message displaying: what’s being downloaded, which app is requesting the download, and options to dismiss the message, cancel the download, or block the app from downloading. (We also added a way to unblock apps in Settings > Privacy > App-requested downloads, in case you change your mind.)

My People:

Technology is all about making it easier for you to connect with your most important people. Whether you want to share a photo, make plans for dinner, or get an answer from a friend or coworker – My People is here to take it to the next level and bring the people you care about most to the center of your experience.

You can now:

Pin your people to the taskbar – we’ll suggest some to start with, or you can pick your own! (Note: you are currently limited to having 3 people pinned to your taskbar currently.)
View multiple communication apps together and filtered to each person on your taskbar.
Choose the app you want to use to chat and we’ll remember for next time.

To start, click on the People icon in the taskbar to activate the first run experience and get setup.

See emoji from your pinned contacts: When you receive emoji from your pinned contacts you can now watch them appear and animate right from the taskbar! Have one of your pinned contacts send you an emoji via Skype (for example “(hero)”) and see what happens! If you’d like to turn this off, open taskbar settings by right-clicking on the taskbar.

Notification Badging: The contacts pinned to your taskbar will now display a counter if there are unseen messages, ensuring you have at-a-glance access to communications you have missed from your pinned contacts. Note: You might need to update Skype to version 11.16.556.0 to see notification badges when new Skype messages come in.

People-first Sharing: You now have two easy ways to share with your people in Windows 10! Drag-and-drop files directly onto the contacts in your taskbar to start an email, or share directly to your contacts via the share picker by choosing from a list recommended people to email.

Windows Shell Features & Improvements:

Fluent Design System: The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update introduces new UI for Start and Action Center that includes elements of our new Fluent Design System which was announced at Build 2017.

Start improvements include:

Acrylic: If you have transparency enabled for Start, you’ll notice it’s now been updated to use the new acrylic design.
Vertical resize: No more glitches at the bottom of the frame.
Horizontal resize: The frame now starts resizing horizontally immediately (like vertical resize), as opposed to only “snapping” to certain widths.
Diagonal resize: The frame can be resized diagonally!
Resize grips: It’s now easier to “grip” the edge of the frame to start resizing.
Tablet mode transition: Smoother transition into tablet mode.

Fluent Design Demo:

A new look for Action Center: Action Center has been redesigned based on your feedback to provide much clearer information separation and hierarchy. And the new design for Action Center also includes elements of our Fluent Design System such as acrylic! (and in case you were wondering, we’ve also added acrylic to our notification toasts!). As a reminder, you can customize the visible quick actions by going to Settings > System > Notifications & actions.

Additionally:

We’ve adjusted our notification buttons to now span across the bottom of the notification, rather than being right-justified.
We just made it easier for you to take action on your notifications by auto-expanding the first notification in each notification group in the Action Center. Now you can quickly triage your emails, snooze your reminders, reply to your texts, etc. without the need to expand every single one of them.
In response to feedback about the X to “dismiss” notifications being confusing, we’ve adjusted it to now be an arrow to make it more clear that the notification is actually being pushed to the Action Center to be reviewed later.

Recover your pin and password from the lock screen: Self Service solutions empower end users, unburden helpdesk/IT admins, and save organizations money. Cloud Self Service Password Reset (Cloud SSPR) has been a really popular Azure AD Premium (AADP) feature and now we want to take this great capability one step further – Windows Integration. If you’re using an AADP or MSA account and you find yourself stuck at the login screen, you can now reset your password and PIN straight from here. Just click the “Reset password” (for password) / ”I forgot my PIN” (for PIN) link and you’ll be prompted to go through the AAD or MSA flow to reset it. Once reset, you’ll be returned to the login screen where you can login with your newly minted credentials.

Updated File Explorer context menu: You can now Share a file in File Explorer via the right-click context menu! Right-click on a file in File Explorer or on the Desktop to bring up the context menu, then share away. NOTE: “Share with” in the context menu has been changed to “Give access to”.

Individually controlling the volume of your UWP apps: We’ve updated the Volume Mixer to now include UWP apps (like Microsoft Edge, or Groove Music), so you can set their volume without impacting the overall system volume. Appreciate everyone who’s shared feedback requesting this, let us know what you’d like to see next! Note: UWP apps will only appear in the Volume Mixer once they start playing sound. To open the Volume Mixer, right-click on the speaker icon in the taskbar.

No more logging out to fix blurry desktop apps: Hey, do you hate having to log out and back in to Windows to fix blurry desktop apps after docking, undocking, or remoting? We do too! In this flight, you only have to relaunch these apps in order to have them render crisply. If you have a high DPI display (a 4K display or other high dots-per-inch (DPI) display, such as Surface displays) and change the display scaling value in any way (this can happen when you dock/undock, remote from a device with a high DPI display, or otherwise change the display scaling setting) most desktop apps become blurry. This is due to 1) the apps don’t respond to a DPI change notification, because they haven’t been updated and 2) Windows keeps the display scaling/DPI data that it reports to apps constant until you log out and back in.

In this flight we’ve changed the way that Windows provides DPI-related information to these applications such that each time one of these applications starts, they’ll get updated data from Windows. This means that for these applications, you simply re-launch them in order for them to render correctly if they’re blurry. While this isn’t what we all want: having these applications render crisply all the time, we feel that it’s a lot less painful to relaunch apps instead of having to close out of all apps and going through a log-out/log-in cycles.

Some things to note: this won’t work for all desktop apps (and doesn’t apply to UWP apps). Also, this only helps apps that become blurry after a change to the display scale factor of the main/primary display. This change, unfortunately, doesn’t improve apps that are blurry on secondary displays when in “extend” display mode. Please give this change a try and let us know if you hit any bugs.

Copy Link in Share: Don’t see the app you’re looking for in the Share UI? If you’re sharing a link – like a website in Microsoft Edge, or an app from Store – we’ve added a new option in the Share UI to copy that link to your clipboard, so you easily can paste it into your app of choice.

New local media folder detection for UWPs: Photos, Groove Music and Movies & TV all have one thing in common: exploring your local content based on the folders you provide. We’ve heard your feedback that sometimes local media is missing as a result of folders not being included, so with this build we’re adding new logic to address this. After a storage scan, we will now detect relevant media folders you might want to include in your collection when looking at the files via UWP apps, and suggest them to you when you go to add new folders. Want to try it out now? Add a new folder with 30+ pictures, songs, or videos to your desktop. Go to Storage Settings and press the refresh button to trigger a scan. The next time you go to add a folder to your favorite UWP (such as Groove Music), you’ll see this new experience:

Note: If no new media is detected, you will see the file picker dialog.

Cortana Features & Improvements

Incoming call notifications: For our Insiders with Android phones, Cortana can now display cross-device incoming call notifications! Install the Cortana app on your phone, go to “Settings” > “Sync notifications” and turn on all the Cortana cross-device features. The next time you receive a call, a notification will appear on your Fast ring PC telling you who it is and giving you the option to text back a reply or decline the call.

Cortana’s settings have been integrated into Settings: Cortana is a core component of Windows and users look to the Settings app to find Cortana’s settings. We’ve heard your feedback about discoverability, and with this build, we’ve made the change to migrate all of Cortana’s settings into Settings. You can access them by clicking the settings gear in Cortana, going to Settings > Cortana, or just searching for the setting you’re interested in.

Microsoft Edge

Pin your favorite websites to your taskbar: Pinned sites are back! We heard your feedback, and are in this build you can now pin a website to the taskbar from Microsoft Edge! We’ll use the site’s icon to give you quick access to your favorite sites right from the taskbar. Simply select “Pin this page to the taskbar” from the settings menu in Microsoft Edge.

Full-screen mode (F11) in Microsoft Edge: This build introduces a new Full-Screen experience in Microsoft Edge. Simply press F11 or choose the new Full-Screen icon in the Settings menu to take your websites full-screen. You can exit Full-Screen view by pressing F11 again, or by clicking the Restore icon in the top-right corner.

Giving you more control over closing tabs: Building on our work in Build 16199, we’ve updated Microsoft Edge to ensure the X in the tab band is always available to close a tab, even when a JavaScript (i.e. alert, prompt, etc.) dialog is showing within Microsoft Edge. Additionally, closing the Edge window always remains an available option. You can also access many browser capabilities (i.e. favorites bar, settings, etc.) while a dialog is showing.

Making it easier to move from another browser: Users can now migrate Cookies and Settings from Chrome to Microsoft Edge, which will make it easier for users to make the move to Microsoft Edge as their primary browser.

New experience when saving new favorites: You can now view your favorites as a directory tree when you save new favorites, and collapse or expand folders from within the “Add to favorites” dialog. Just click the “Save in” folder list to get started!

Edit URL for Favorites: You can now edit the URL of any favorite in the Favorites menu or the Favorites Bar. You can use this to update the location of a site that has moved, or to create Bookmarklets in the favorites bar.

EPUB experience in Microsoft Edge

Annotate Books in Microsoft Edge: We’ve added the ability to annotate EPUB Books by highlighting in four colors, underlining, and adding comments. To get started, select some text, and choose an option from the menu.

To add notes as you read, select text, tap or click the Add a note button and add your note.

To edit or delete your note, click the Edit your note button.

Copy and Ask Cortana: Now, when you select your text, you can Copy and Ask Cortana in addition to adding notes, highlighting and underlining. Cortana can help you do a little research while you’re reading an EPUB book!

Ink Notes: Got ink? Add a note and write or draw on it with your pen.

To see your note, just hover over the note button—no need to open it.

Books roamed across devices: Your books from the Windows Store are available on your Windows 10 devices, and your reading progress, bookmarks, and notes are kept in sync.

PDF Reader in Microsoft Edge

Highlight Colors & Ask Cortana: We’ve added more highlight colors and the option to Ask Cortana in PDFs in Microsoft Edge.

PDF Form filling: Every now and then we encounter forms to be filled which are in PDF format. Now you can fill in PDF based forms within Microsoft Edge, save them and print them!

PDF Annotations: The annotations capability in the browser is now extended to PDFs as well. You can use the “Make a Web Note” button on the top right of browser frame to invoke an annotations bar.

Using different modes in the annotations bar, you can ink on the PDF, highlight text and erase your annotations. You can save the work onto the PDF file for later use.

Table of Contents for easier navigation: For reading longer documents, you can now use the Table of Contents (ToC) feature for easier navigation. You will see the ToC button on the left of the PDF toolbar if the document has ToC defined by the author. Click on any heading in the side pane to navigate to that part of the document.

Better viewing and navigation: Sometimes PDF documents, such as documents that are copies of documents scanned in, are not in proper orientation and need to be rotated to view them properly. Now you can rotate the PDF documents for better readability. Look for the rotate button in the toolbar. Also, it is important to be able to adjust the reading layout of the files to best suit user’s needs based on the screen size, type etc. Using the “Layout” flyout menu on the toolbar, now you can switch from one page to two page layouts and change to page-wise scrolling for better navigation experience for longer documents.

Emoji 5.0

We have added support for the latest Unicode updates – including new snacks, actions, dinosaurs, and even fantasy characters like genies, fairies, and zombies!

They’re all accessible via both the touch keyboard and the Emoji Panel. Bonus: Along the way, we also updated our emoji pickers to now make it possible to access the profession emoji and gender diverse options for some of our people actions (for example, you can now select male or female face palm).

Finally, we’ve tweaked some of our original emoji designs based on your feedback and to improve consistency with how the emoji is displayed on other platforms.
New emoji include:

Examples of updated emoji – before:

And after:

Search for emoji in Emoji Panel: We’ve updated the hardware keyboard’s new Emoji Panel to now provide a search feature! After opening the panel via the Win + period (.) or semicolon (;) hotkeys, keep typing! The words you type will be used to filter the emoji displayed. If you close the panel by clicking “x” button or pressing Esc, the words will remain. We’re still working on enriching our emoji keywords – have any suggestions? Log feedback! Note: The Emoji Panel is currently only available when the en-us keyboard is active.

Dark theme for Emoji Panel: Do you love dark theme? Because we do ????. If you have dark theme enabled (via Settings > Personalization > Colors), you’ll now see the Emoji Panel background display using dark colors instead of light.

Task Manager

Track your GPU performance: For the Task Manager fans out there, we’re happy to share that we’ve heard your feedback and we’ve updated Task Manager to now include GPU info. Our engineering team used the feedback you gave us that is part of this Feedback Collection to prioritize and to design the feature – thank you! The Performance tab shows GPU utilization information for each separate GPU component (such as 3D and Video encode/decode), as well as graphics memory usage stats. The Details tab shows you GPU utilization info for each process. Please note that this feature is still under construction and you will find issues and bugs, as always please send us feedback in Feedback Hub under Desktop Environment > Task manager.

We have made some design changes to the GPU section of Performance tab:

GPU performance updates: We’ve made a few small changes in this build to the GPU performance tracker in Task Manager. We’ve updated the UI layout, and added more details like DirectX version and the physical location of your GPU. Only hardware GPUs show up in the list, and the software-only basic display adapter is hidden.

The GPU name is now shown on the left-hand side of the Performance tab for each GPU.
We now default to the multi-engine view, which shows performance monitors for the four most active GPU engines. Typically you’ll see charts for the 3D, Copy, Video Encode and Video Decode engines. Right-click on the chart to switch back to the single-engine view.
There is now a total GPU memory text counter next to the dedicated and shared text counters at the bottom of the Performance tab.
The Direct X version now also contains the highest supported DX feature level.

Grouped processes in Task Manager: We announced that Runtime Broker was going per app. Between this and some of the feedback for our apps, we’ve heard that you’d like to have all of each app’s processes grouped in a single collection for easy management. So we did just that! Check it out in Build 16226 by opening a bunch of Microsoft Edge tabs and windows, and let us know how it’s working for you! We’ve also added logic to show browser tab names where available, so you can easily know what you’re looking at.

We have improved how Microsoft Edge’s processes are labeled in Task Manager: We introduced grouping an app’s processes together in Task Manager. For Microsoft Edge, tab processes were labeled in Task Manager with their web page title. Starting in Build 16241, additional processes (such as the Chakra JIT Compiler, UI Service, and Manager process) are now labeled in Task Manager.

Introducing Power Throttling: You may remember some of the power experiments we did back in January with Build 15002. Power Throttling was one of those experiments, and showed to have up to 11% savings in CPU power consumption for some of the most strenuous use cases. We have enabled this in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.

Starting with Build 16193, the Task Manager column name has changed from “Background Moderated” to “Power Throttling”.

Delivery Optimization

Delivery Optimization has been synonymous with “Peer-to-peer” but few people are aware that it is also used as the main downloader for content downloaded from Windows Update and Windows Store. Delivery Optimization, even without P2P, is what makes downloads from Windows Store much faster as well as makes downloads of Quality and Feature updates far more reliable. In line with this, the main settings page – now titled “Delivery Optimization” – indicates that while you can enable or disable the P2P functionality, Delivery Optimization is still used when downloading updates and apps directly from Microsoft’s content servers. You can go to this page via Settings > Update & security > Windows Update under “Advanced options” and then “Delivery Optimization.

You will notice two new links under the Delivery Optimization settings page that provide you with some new features for more control and visibility:

Delivery Optimization Advanced Options: Here you can configure various Download and Upload settings.

Delivery Optimization continuously measures your available bandwidth during a download and dynamically adjusts the amount of bandwidth used in background downloads to ensure these downloads won’t interrupt your use of your device. However, Delivery Optimization may not be aware of download activity that takes place on other devices in your household. If you have limited connectivity and would like to minimize the impact you can now use the Download settings to throttle your download speed for background downloads.

If you own multiple devices we encourage you to allow downloads from other PCs on your local network to reduce the amount of bandwidth used by your devices that are downloading the same updates.

In addition, if you enable the option to download from other PCs on the Internet, you may want to restrict the use of your upload bandwidth by throttling the upload speed or the total amount of bytes sent to other devices by enabling a Monthly upload limit.

Activity Monitor: Here you can see the overall bandwidth used in downloads of OS Updates including Feature and Quality updates as well as Store App downloads and updates on your device. You will also be able to see exactly the amount of data coming from other PCs on your local network or other PC on the Internet based on your settings.

Note that the data reflects the bandwidth used since the first day of the month.

Touch Keyboard

We have a totally new touch keyboard on PCs with touch! If you’ve been jealous of better keyboard features on your phone, then you’ll be happy to hear with today’s build we’re bringing those familiar phone keyboard experiences to your PC with our new XAML-based touch keyboard!

Enhanced Text Prediction: We’ve made a bunch of improvements to our text prediction engine to make it more intelligent. For example, you now don’t need to type anything other than “Text ” to complete the frequently used message, “Text me when you get a chance” using the suggested words. If you’re using a UWP app, you can also now enjoy Emoji suggestions! Try it out! Type “birthday ”, “coffee ”, or “dog ” and see what happens! Prediction is currently only working with the English US keyboard, however we’re working on enabling more languages

Improved emoji experience: If you switch to the touch keyboard’s emoji view, you’ll find can now smoothly scroll through the entire contents of each emoji category, rather than page by page. You’ll also notice that any additional available emoji candidates based on your most recent word are displayed at the top in the candidate area

Type to search with the new Emoji Panel now supports Emoji 5.0! We also added a bunch more keywords along the way.

One-handed touch keyboard: Following extensive research on tablet postures, we’re adding a new keyboard layout to provide the most comfort when holding the device in your hands! It looks similar to a phone keyboard – smaller and more narrow. You can freely put this smaller touch keyboard wherever you want (although we recommend docked to the side of your screen ) and use it with one hand. To switch between languages, press and hold on the &123 key. Note: This keyboard takes the place of the split keyboard layout

Shape writing with the one-handed touch keyboard: One of the most powerful phone keyboard features for fast and easy text input involves swiping over the keys without releasing your finger on the screen. We call it shape writing. Today we proudly announce the first shape writing keyboard on PC! Because it’s works just like your familiar phone-style one-handed keyboard, you don’t need to do anything to learn it again. Just use it as you would use your phone’s touch keyboard. Bonus: it also works with pen! Shape writing is currently only supported for the English US keyboard, however we’re working on enabling more languages.

A new touch keyboard settings menu: Along with all our other improvements, we’ve updated the way to switch into Handwriting panel and other keyboard layouts. You can find our keyboard settings menu icon at the top left corner of the touch keyboard. It’s a one-stop settings panel for all the layouts (Default, One-handed, Handwriting, Full) and modes (Docked, Floating), as well as a shortcut for jumping to language settings.

As we light up these new keyboard experiences, it’s very important that we receive your feedback to help make improvements and ensure we ship a polished experience to Windows users. If you have a touch or pen capable device, please take a moment to try it out in any languages that you speak and give feedback in as much detail as possible. Our readiness decision will be based on what you tell us. (PS – don’t forget you can move the keyboard around when it’s undocked by dragging the move icon in the top right corner!)

Please note the touch keyboards for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages are not working with this build – we will fix this as soon as possible in an upcoming flight.

Dictation on the Desktop: Our keen-eyed Insiders may have noticed a microphone button in the touch keyboard pictures above – that’s because you can now use dictation to input English or Chinese text on the desktop! Simply tap the microphone button in the top left corner of the touch keyboard or handwriting panel, or press the new dictation hotkey Win + H to start dictating. Currently only available for English (United States) input methods.

Besides dictating text, you can also use voice commands to do basic editing or to input punctuations. Below are some examples of English dictation voice commands:

Say “press backspace” to inject a backspace character
Say “clear selection” to unselect the text that has been selected
Say “press delete” to inject a delete keystroke
Say “delete that” to delete the most recent speech recognition results, or the currently selected text
Say “delete last three words” to delete the last three words
Say “stop dictating” to terminate the dictation session
Say “end spelling” to terminate spelling mode
Say “go after <word or phrase>” to move the cursor to the first character after the specified word or phrase
Say “go to the end of paragraph” to move the cursor to the end of the paragraph
Say “move back to the previous word” to move the cursor to the left side of the previous word
Say “go to start of <word or phrase>” to move the cursor to the first character before the specified word or phrase
Say “go to the start of paragraph” to move the insertion point to the start of paragraph
Say “go down to next sentence” to move the cursor forward to next sentence
Say “go to the end of the sentence” to move the insertion point to the end of the sentence
Say “move to the start of the word” to move the insertion point to the start of the word
Say “go to the left” to inject a left arrow into input
Say “move right” to inject a right arrow into input
Say “select <word or phrase>” to select the specific word or phrase
Say “select that” to select the most recent speech recognition result
Say “select next three words” to select the next three words
Say “start spelling” to switch to spelling mode
Say “comma” (or “period”, “question mark” etc.) to input the punctuation “,” (or “.”, “?”, etc.)

Shape writing for more languages: In addition to English, Shape writing is now available on the new touch keyboard for the following languages: Catalan (Catalan), Croatian (Croatia), Czech (Czech), Danish (Denmark), Dutch (Netherlands), English (India), English (United States), English (United Kingdom), Finnish (Finland), French (Canada), French (France), French (Switzerland), German (Germany), Greek (Greece), Hebrew(Israel), Hungarian (Hungary), Indonesian (Indonesia), Italian (Italy), Norwegian, Persian (Iran), Polish (Poland), Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian (Romania), Russian (Russia), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish (Sweden), Turkish (Turkey), Vietnamese (Vietnam).

If you speak any of these languages, please take a moment to try it out and log feedback. If you have anything you can specifically repro consistently, be sure to mention it in the problem report.

Note: For this and the below mentioned updates to work, the language resources will need to be downloaded. If you upgrade with the language, it should happen naturally, but if you add the language after getting the build, you may need to go to Optional Features and manually download them. If language resources for that language have not been downloaded, then you will see the swipe pattern, but no text will be input into whatever field you’re typing in. In addition, you will not see any text predictions.

Text prediction for more languages: We also support text prediction upon your typing on the languages above and more! Please try out your mother tongue with our keyboard!

Touch keyboard for East Asian languages: Now the new touch keyboard supports some of East Asian languages such as Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean!

One-handed curve-flick touch keyboard for Japanese: We’re excited to announce that curve-flick input is coming to the PC! We’ve had this for a while on Windows 10 Mobile, and we know how much you like it, so with today’s build you’ll now be able to use it with the Japanese one-handed keyboard on PC too ^_^. For those who are unfamiliar with it, curve-flick input is an advanced method for quickly inputting Japanese Kana. If you’ve ever used flick input with your phone, please try it out today on your PC and share feedback! (and, if you’ve never tried it on your phone, share your feedback too! We love to hear your thoughts).

Moving with ease: We’ve made some adjustments based on your feedback. First: you no longer need to hold the move icon to move the touch keyboard. We’ve removed that, and now you can just grab anywhere on the candidate pane that doesn’t have predictions, and place the keyboard where you want. Second: when using the one-handed keyboard, you’ll find that the left-most option is now “undocked”. If you use this option, then whenever you relaunch the touch keyboard it will appear back in the location it’d been in before being dismissed.

Shifting up a gear: We’ve heard your feedback, and we’re very excited to let you know that with this build of Windows, you can now use the shift key to cycle between capitalization states – just like on Windows 10 Mobile!

Updated settings flyout: We’ve updated the design of our settings flyout so you can now easily access Language Settings, Keyboard Settings, or help if needed.

Handwriting & Pen

With the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, we are introducing a new XAML-based handwriting panel – with more gestures, easier editing, emoji, and more!

Write as much as you want in the panel with the new conversion & overflow model: As you write, you’ll now see your previous words convert to typed text within the handwriting panel. When you fill the handwriting panel and lift your pen off the screen, the text will shift so you have room to continue writing. Press the commit button to insert all the text and clear the slate.

Select text to edit it: See something you want to change? If you select text while the handwriting panel is open, that text will now appear within the panel so you can easily make alterations.

Make corrections within the handwriting panel by overwriting converted text: Was something misrecognized? Instead of using the suggested text alternate, you now have the option of just inking the correct letters right on top of the converted text!

Make corrections using ink gestures: Once your written words have been converted to type, or if you’ve selected existing text, you can now easily make simple edits from within the handwriting panel using our four new gestures: strikethrough, scratch, join, and split. Try it out!

Easier access to emoji and symbols: We’ve added two new buttons to the handwriting panel, so you can easily input emoji or symbols without needing to switch to the touch keyboard Simply tap the button, pick the character you want, and you’re set to go!

Reducing the chance of palm rejection: We’ve added a new setting in Pen & Windows Ink Settings so finger inking needs to be explicitly enabled – this will help avoid inadvertent ink being drawn on the handwriting panel as you’re writing with your pen.

Floating by default: While you still have the option to choose, we’ve made the decision for the handwriting panel to now by default appear next to where you’re writing. To change modes, tap the new keyboard settings menu button in the top left corner of the keyboard.

Improved handwriting recognition for English (United States): We’ve made some changes to our US English handwriting recognition engine to improve its accuracy. Would love for Insiders to try it out and share feedback on how it feels now.

English mode for Simplified Chinese handwriting: To further improve the recognition accuracy of mixed input (when Chinese and English characters are inked together), we’ve added an English mode button when handwriting in Simplified Chinese. Just press the button, ink the desired English words, and the inking done in English mode will be recognized using the English (United States) handwriting recognition engine. After your inking in English is finished, you can press the English mode button again to go back to default mode.

Find My Pen: Don’t know where you put your pen? The pen doesn’t have a GPS, so we can’t help you there, but what we *can* do is tell you where you were when you last inked on your computer. Which is what we’ve done! Head over to Settings > Update & Security > “Find My Device” to see what it’s all about.

Scrolling with pen: In the effort to create a more intuitive pen interaction on Windows, we are emphasizing natural and direct manipulation of content with pen. You don’t have to “hunt and peck” for scrollbars or frequently switch between pen and touch when navigating; now you can scroll content directly and fluently as you would with your finger.

Pen scrolling now works in Win32 apps: Building on what we lit up with 16215, you can now use your pen to scroll in File Explorer and other win32 apps.

Selection with pen. We also revised selection with pen by giving it more control over the selection process. Not only are we showing selection grippers whenever text is selected via pen, but also are allowing for a consistent and fast selection of content – text, objects, or ink—by dragging the pen while the barrel button is pressed.

PC Gaming Improvements

Game bar improvements:

Based on your feedback, the Game bar (Win + G) now has a button to enable or disable Game Mode for the current game. Its icon will be updated soon in a future flight.
The Game bar (Win + G) now allows you to take screenshots of games running in HDR. Sharing those screenshots to Xbox Live using the Xbox app will come in a future update of the app. Note: broadcasting does not support HDR. Screenshots will be taken in the resolution of the game window, which enables the 4K screenshots that are now supported. Game Clips and broadcasts will be transcoded to 1080p if the resolution is higher than that.
Screenshots of games running in HDR should now correctly save a copy in PNG that is tone mapped to SDR.
Bitrate changes during game broadcasting to Mixer should now be smoother and more seamless.
When broadcasting to Mixer, you can now specify the language that you are speaking during the broadcast.
The resources made available to games running in Game Mode have been tweaked on popular machine configs, including 6 and 8 core CPU machines, resulting in improved game performance for games running in Game Mode.

Improved Game Settings: We’ve made some improvements and adjustments that PC gamers will enjoy via Settings > Gaming and the Windows Game bar (WIN + G). Some things to check out:

Broadcast using game-only audio: Under Settings > Gaming > Broadcasting, you can now choose “Per-app audio” to broadcast using only the game’s audio to Beam as opposed to the audio for your entire PC.
Audio settings is now Game DVR in Game bar: We have renamed the Audio settings page under the settings in Game bar to be Game DVR. All Game DVR settings from the general gaming settings page has been moved to be under Game DVR. Per-app audio settings is also included here as well.

New help options: We have added a new “Xbox Networking” section under Settings > Gaming. Here, we’ll help you attempt to identify and resolve issues preventing you from using voice chatting and playing multiplayer games with other Xbox Live users.

We have updated the Game Mode icon on the Game bar.

Hyper-V

Revert VM: Continuing our theme of simplifying Hyper-V for developers on Windows 10 (see What’s New), we’re introducing automatic checkpoints so that you’ll always be able to undo a mistake in your virtual machine – you can now always revert to the last time you started a virtual machine.

Virtual battery support: You can now see your machine’s battery state in your VMs! To try this feature, create a new VM using the “New-VM” cmdlet, and add the “-Prerelease” flag. This will give you a pre-release VM that will have this feature enabled.

Share your VMs: You’ll find a new icon in Virtual Machine Connection that will compress your VM into a “.vmcz” file. Double click this file on your destination machine to start importing the VM – easy as that!

You will see a new “virtual machine gallery” under quick create. There isn’t anything in the gallery yet and we’ll have more details on this in the future. In the meantime, choosing “Local installation source” will allow you to pick an image from your computer.

If you’re wondering where the options for VM Name and networking went, they’re in the “More options” section which introduces another new feature in Hyper-V. Hyper-V on Windows 10 provides a default network so your virtual machines share networking with your computer using NAT.

Windows Defender

Controlled folder access in Windows Defender Antivirus: In this build, we’re making it easier for you to protect valuable data from malicious apps and threats, such as ransomware. To enable the feature, search for and open the Windows Defender Security Center from Start, go to the Virus & threat protection settings section, and set the switch to On:

Controlled folder access monitors the changes that apps make to files in certain protected folders. If an app attempts to make a change to these files, and the app is blacklisted by the feature, you’ll get a notification about the attempt. You can complement the protected folders with additional locations, and add the apps that you want to allow access to those folders.

Allowing apps can be useful if you’re finding a particular app that you know and trust is being blocked by the Controlled folder access feature. Click Allow an app through Controlled folder access and locate and add the app you want to allow.

You can add additional folders to the list of protected folders, but you cannot alter the default list, which includes folders such as Documents, Pictures, Movies, and Desktop. Adding other folders to Controlled folder access can be handy, for example, if you don’t store files in the default Windows libraries or you’ve changed the location of the libraries away from the defaults.

Click Protected folders in the Controlled folder access area and enter the full path of the folder you want to monitor. You can also enter network shares and mapped drives, but environment variables and wildcards are not supported (for right now).

Exploit Protection: We’ve heard your feedback regarding the upcoming EMET EOL, so we’re excited to announce that starting with this build you can now audit, configure, and manage Windows system and application exploit mitigation settings right from the Windows Defender Security Center! You don’t need to be using Windows Defender Antivirus to take advantage of these settings.

After upgrading to this build, you can find these settings by opening the Windows Defender Security Center and going to the App & browser control page:

Either right-click the icon in the notification area on the taskbar and click Open, or search via the Start menu for Windows Defender Security Center
From Windows Defender Security Center, click on App & browser control and then scroll to the bottom of the resulting screen to find Exploit Protection

More detailed documentation will follow on Microsoft Docs, and remember that Exploit Protection is a work-in-progress and might not be fully functional just yet!

Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG)

Announced last September in the Microsoft Edge Blog, Windows Defender Application Guard for Microsoft Edge is now available in Windows Insider Previews for Enterprise users in the Fast Ring. Microsoft Edge running in Application Guard provides enterprises the maximum level of protection from malware and zero day attacks against Windows. We’ve made it easy to test drive Microsoft Edge with Application Guard. First, turn on Windows Defender Application Guard using the “Turn Windows features on or off” dialog. Select the checkbox as shown below for Windows Defender Application Guard.

Click OK and then restart your computer.

Next, open Microsoft Edge and then click the Edge menu. You’ll see a new menu choice for “New Application Guard window.”

When you click this, a new Microsoft Edge window will open in. You’re ready to enter any website address in the address bar to visit and that session will be isolated in Application Guard.

We are looking forward to your feedback, here is a link to reach us on Feedback Hub.

See this forum post for more details.

Note: Windows Defender Application Guard requires Windows 10 Enterprise Edition and Hyper-V. Your PC must be capable of running Microsoft Hyper-V to use Application Guard.

Giving you access to all the rich features in Microsoft Edge while using Application Guard: Building on our work in Build 16188, we have added support for Microsoft Edge data persistence while using Application Guard. Once enabled, data such as your favorites, cookies, and saved passwords will be persisted across Application Guard sessions. The persisted data will be not be shared or surfaced on the host, but it will be available for future Microsoft Edge in Application Guard sessions.

How to take advantage of Data Persistence when using Microsoft Edge with Application Guard: You enable Data Persistence for Microsoft Edge in Application Guard using Group Policy. Note that Data Persistence for Application Guard with Microsoft Edge sessions is not enabled by default. To enable data persistence, close all Microsoft Edge windows and update the Windows Components > Windows Defender Application Guard policy to turn on data persistence:

After the Group Policy settings are set, next launch New Application Guard Window from the Microsoft Edge menu:

Then browse to your favorite web site and add it to Favorites in Microsoft Edge as shown here:

How to find your Favorites after you close Edge with Application Guard: Since you have enabled Data Persistence using Group Policy for Application Guard, the site you saved to your Favorites will be available for later use, with Microsoft Edge in Application Guard, even after reboots as well as build to build upgrades of Windows.

Read more about what the Windows Defender Application Guard team has been working on in this latest Insider Preview by visiting this community page

To learn more about what’s coming in Windows Defender Application Guard, please take a look at this new Microsoft Mechanics video.

Windows Sonic

Windows Sonic, available in the Windows 10 Creators Update, is now even easier to enable with this update. Plug in a pair of headphones, right-click the sound icon in the notification area, and select Spatial sound to choose your preferred format. You can also configure your 5.1, 7.1, or Dolby Atmos for home theater from this menu if it’s your currently selected default endpoint. You can learn more about Windows Sonic here.

Settings

Settings > System > About now integrated with System Health: The About Settings page has been simplified to be accessible to all customers. In addition to the overall UX cleanup, we have also added a health section that pulls in information from the Windows Defender Security Center so you can see your system health at a glance.

Tips and Videos in Settings: To help you learn more about your options, we’re starting to add tips and videos to Settings. We’re still growing our collection, but to start with you can find them in under Settings > Ease of Access or Settings > Update & security, a handful of other areas. More content is being added all the time and we’re really hoping to get your help figuring out the best tip content for each page. If you have an idea of a tip that would help your least techie friend or family member, please provide us feedback through the feedback hub! Note: Depending on the size of the Settings window, you will find the tips either at the bottom of the page, or on the side.

Expanding Storage Sense’s abilities: During development of the Windows 10 Creators Update, we added the ability to automatically free up space using Storage Sense. We’re continuing to grow this feature, and you can now choose to automatically clean up files that have been unchanged in your Downloads folder for 30 days. Just go to Settings > System > Storage and click on “Change how we free up space” to adjust this setting.

We have also added the following capabilities to Storage Sense:

Delete your previous versions of Windows straight from Storage Sense: With all the work we’ve been doing to enhance Storage Sense features for freeing up space, we felt it just made sense to bring in Windows.old clean up too.
A new look: Since we’ve added a few new features, we’ve tweaked the design a bit to make everything fit together a bit neater.

New Video Playback Settings: Head to Settings > Personalization > Video Playback and you’ll now find some additional controls for media enthusiasts. If you have an HDR monitor, we’d love to hear your feedback on how video streaming feels when these new options are enabled. We’ve also added some battery settings for you to decide whether you’d prefer to optimize video streaming for battery usage or video quality.

Note: You’ll notice an “Unsupported video type or invalid file path” error at the top of the page. This is a known issue we’re looking into, it shouldn’t otherwise impact the usage of these settings.

A new HDR and Advanced Color Settings Page: If you have at least one connected display that supports HDR, you’ll now see some additional information! Go to Settings > System > Display > “HDR and advanced color settings” to find more details about the HDR settings of the currently selected display.

Per-App Defaults Settings Page: In the past, when using Settings you had to start with your file type or protocol if you wanted to make a change to the default app. That’s changing with this build, and you can now start with your app, and then see the available options for what it can handle. To see this new option, go to Settings > Apps > Default apps > “Set defaults by App”. Choose an app and click ‘Manage’ to see all the file types and protocol associations for which the app is the default. This page takes the place of the one that had been available in Control Panel, as part of our ongoing effort to converge the settings experience.

Updated Network connection properties page: We’ve heard your feedback that setting a network profile to public or private isn’t discoverable, so we’ve updated the Network connection properties page to make it easier and prominent. Instead of the previous toggle under “Make this PC discoverable”, you’ll now find two radio buttons to select whether the profile should be public or private.

A new context menu for Wi-Fi networks in the View Available Networks flyout: To get you where you need to go faster, we’ve added a new context menu full of quick actions when you right-click one of the listed Wi-Fi networks. Options include Connect, Disconnect, View Properties, or Forget Network.

View your active Windows Update policies: If there are any applied group policies for Windows Update, a page will now appear in Windows Update Settings so you can look through them.

Understanding your updates: We now list out the individual update status and progress in Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update. So if there are multiple updates pending (for example, a new build, a driver update, and a definition update for Windows Defender), you can see and track each different status, which wasn’t as obvious with the single progress bar used in prior builds.

New Remote Desktop Settings Page: As part of our ongoing effort to converge Settings and Control Panel, you can now enable Remote Desktop and configure related settings from Settings > System > Remote Desktop! We’ve improved this page from its counterpart in Control Panel to help you more easily establish a remote connection to your PC from a Remote Desktop client application. On the new Remote Desktop settings page, you can find associated settings like sleep (“Keep my PC awake for connections when it is plugged in”) and PC discoverability to help you know if your PC is remotely accessible. We also surface your PC name on this page, which you will need to connect from the RD client applications.

Improving your update experience: If an update has failed, when available, to help you better understand what went wrong we will now use a plain text string to describe the error that was encountered. This text, and the error code if visible, will now be selectable so you can easily copy and paste it elsewhere.

Ninjacat Icon for Windows Insider Program in Settings: Check out the new Ninjacat icon representing the Windows Insider Program under Settings > Update & security > Windows Insider Program.

Ease of Access (Accessibility)

Narrator gains auto-captioning: Narrator can now use artificial intelligence to generate descriptions for images that lack alternative text! The service also includes the ability to extract text from images using optical character recognition. Want to try it out? Turn on Narrator, set focus to the image below, then press Capslock + Shift + D to hear its description. You will need to be connected to the internet for it to work.

Scan Mode on By Default in Narrator: The largest change that you will experience is that Scan Mode is now on by default. This means that:

Up and Down Arrows to get through everything: You can simply use the up and down arrow keys to get through all of the content of your application.
Press Space to Interact: To interact with simple controls (such as buttons, checkboxes, toggle buttons etc. you can press the space bar).
Editbox Switching: If you navigate to an edit field using the up and down arrows, Narrator will automatically turn off Scan Mode so that you can type into the edit field. When you are ready to exit the edit field you can use the up and down arrows to exit the edit field and Narrator will turn scan mode back on.
Turn off Scan Mode with Caps + Space: If you want to turn off scan mode, and want to get back to the old way of doing things, press Caps + Space. It will be turned off for that app and you will hear “Off”.
Remembering the state of scan mode by application: If you explicitly turn off scan mode, by pressing Caps + Space in an application, this choice will be saved in an exceptions list so that when you reopen the application Scan Mode is off. To remove this application from the exceptions list you can press Caps + Space again
Left and Right Arrow to move by character: Left and right arrows will move you by character

Since Scan Mode is now on by default in Narrator, we’ve removed the popup dialog when first launching Narrator explaining how to start scan mode.

Narrator Input learning: This will allow you to learn the keys on your device. The narrator will tell you the key that you have pressed, and the Narrator command associated with it. This mode can be turned on and off with Caps + 1.

New and improved Narrator hotkeys:

To read from where you currently are through the rest of the application you can press Caps + R for Read.
To jump to the beginning of an application you can now press Caps + Home and to jump to the end of an application you can press Caps + End.
The read window command, Caps + W also had some improvements in this release. Caps + W will now read both the controls in the window and the text.

Narrator Getting Started User Guide: There is now a button in the main Narrator UI to the Narrator User Guide located here, where you can find more information about scan mode and all of the Scan Mode commands.

Streamlining Narrator Feedback: We’ve updated Narrator so that when you press Caps Lock + E + E while Narrator is running, it will now launch the Feedback Hub.

Braille improvements: Narrator users can type and read using different braille translations, choose a blinking cursor representation, and choose the duration of “flash messages”. You can also now perform braille input for app shortcuts and modifier keys, which enables you to use your braille display for common tasks such as:

Pressing the Tab key
Pressing the Escape key
Pressing the Windows key
Pressing sequences like Win + U to open Ease of Access Settings
Pressing sequences like Alt + F to open the file menu
Pressing sequences like Ctrl + S to save
Pressing sequences like Ctrl + Alt + N
Using first letter navigation in lists
And more!

For the app shortcuts, there are also new commands to perform that input. Here’s a list of example commands (Braille dots = Keyboard input):

Space + dot4 + dot5 = Tab key (Tab key)
Space + dot1 + dot2 = Shift + Tab key (Set skipping of blank braille windows on/off)
Space + dot2 + dot3 + dot4 + dot5 = Alt + Tab key (Set track screen cursor on/off)
Space + dot2 + dot4 + dot5 + dot6 = Windows key (Set sliding braille windows on/off)
Space + dot1 + dot2 + dot3 + dot5 = Windows + Tab key (Set autorepeat on/off)
Space + Routing Key 1 – 12 = F1 – F12 keys
Dot7 = Backspace key
Dot8 = Enter key
Space + dot2 + dot6 = Escape key
Space + dot3 = Cursor left key
Space + dot6 = Cursor right key
Space + dot1 = Cursor up key
Space + dot4 = Cursor down key
Space + dot2 + dot3 = Page up key
Space + dot5 + dot6 = Page down key
Space + dot2 = Home key
Space + dot5 = End key
Space + dot3 + dot5 = Insert key
Space + dot2 + dot5 + dot6 = Delete key

Inject and hold one or more modifier keys followed by another letter or key:

Space + dot8 + dot1 = Hold Windows key
Space + dot8 + dot2 = Hold Alt key
Space + dot8 + dot3 = Hold Ctrl key
Space + dot8 + dot4 = Hold Shift key
Space + dot8 + dot5 = Hold AltGr key
Space + dot8 + dot6 = Hold Caps Lock key
Space + dot8 + dot7 = Un-hold all modifiers

Introducing Color filters: Windows 10 now includes color filters at the system level, including filters designed to make it easier for people with color blindness to differentiate between colors like red and green and to make it easier for people with light sensitivity to create and consume content. You can find these new filtering options under Settings > Ease of Access > Color and High Contrast” (previously called High Contrast Settings).

Magnifier UI improvements: We’ve updated the Magnifier zoom in and out buttons to have a more modern style.

Note: You’ll notice a new “Enable bitmap smoothing” option in Magnifier Settings. This feature isn’t functioning yet, but we’ll let you know when it is.

Improved bitmap scaling for Magnifier: Text will now appear smoother when magnified using Magnifier. To enable or disable this, go to Settings > Ease of Access > Magnifier > “Enable bitmap smoothing”.

A reimagined Magnifier Settings page: In order to improve the experience both for low vision users, as well as casual Magnifier users who use it for presentations or quick zooming, we’ve updated the Magnifier Settings page. Insiders will notice that the page has not only been redesigned, but also comes with a few new features, namely:

You can now easily follow Narrator around the screen with Magnifier by selecting “Follow the Narrator cursor”.
We’ve embedded a list of all the available Magnifier shortcuts into the Settings page for quick reference.
You can now zoom using your mouse wheel by holding down a key combination (Win + Ctrl)
We’ve added an option to open the Magnifier settings from anywhere in the OS by pressing Ctrl + Win + M.
You can now set your preferred Magnifier mode in Settings.
We’ve added an option to select your preferred zoom increment when using Magnifier.

If you’re a Magnifier user, please try it out and share your feedback!