Windows 11 has a couple of useful tweaks in testing for File Explorer and widgets

Okay, so not everyone's interested in widgets, but we've caught a glimpse of icon animations, and a nifty feature for tabs in File Explorer.

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Windows 11 has a couple of fresh changes which are hidden in preview builds, which a leaker has uncovered using ViVeTool.

As anyone who follows Windows leaks will doubtless be unsurprised to learn, this is PhantomOfEarth (who accounts for a lot of spillage around the OS, as well as Albacore on X).

The first change which has been dug up using ViVeTool (the Windows configuration utility) is an improvement for File Explorer tabs which you can see in the above tweet.

Essentially, it allows you to right-click on an existing tab, and open a duplicate (so you can then dive further into other folders there, while you've still got the original folder open in the initial tab).

The other change is for widgets, with Microsoft recently introducing a larger set of animated icons for the widgets button on the taskbar. These have only been sent live for some testers, but they can be enabled using ViVeTool, with PhantomOfEarth doing so, and showing how they look in the below tweet.

Not everyone uses widgets by any means - and note that another change in the pipeline is widget notifications. This allows developers to send notifications to the taskbar for widgets, which definitely won't be everyone's cup of tea - fortunately Microsoft is set to provide an option to disable these.

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Darren has written for numerous magazines and websites in the technology world for almost 30 years, including TechRadar, PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Computeractive, and many more. He worked on his first magazine (PC Home) long before Google and most of the rest of the web existed. In his spare time, he can be found gaming, going to the gym, and writing books (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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