Windows 11 users get ready for more ‘recommendations’ from Microsoft – but I’m relieved to say these suggestions might actually be useful | usagoldmines.com

• Windows 11 has a couple of new recommendations in testing now
• There’s a change to the Start menu that suggests apps that are often snapped together side-by-side
• Another addition is with File Explorer which recommends files that are commonly used (or recently downloaded)

Windows 11 has a couple of changes in testing showing how Microsoft is pushing ahead with getting the OS to make more recommendations – though fortunately, there’s not an advert to be seen here.

This work is on both File Explorer and the Start menu, two key pieces of the interface in Windows 11, and it’s happening in a new preview release in the Beta channel (build 22635.5025).

With the ‘Recommended’ panel in the Start menu, some testers will now see recommendations of two apps bundled together if these are often candidates to be snapped together (meaning run side-by-side in a pair of windows snapped to fill the screen).

In Microsoft’s example, there’s a recommendation to run both WhatsApp and File Explorer together – just click on the icon, and the two apps will be started alongside each other.

With the second introduction here, Microsoft is bringing in ‘Recommended’ files on the Home page of File Explorer, where testers will see a list of “relevant files” based on previous activity. These could be recently downloaded files or commonly used ones.

It should be noted that this change is not coming to Europe (the EEA or European Economic Area) for now, but it will apply to Windows 11 users signed in to a Microsoft account, or just a local account on the PC.

Microsoft’s blog post outlines another useful change here, which is the fix for a bug in File Explorer whereby when it’s closed using the ‘X’ button (top-right), it can be very slow to disappear.

Analysis: Explorer woes are numerous still, but these are useful steps forward

It’s good to see one of the issues with File Explorer being tackled, but there are quite a number of performance-related hiccups that various Windows 11 users have reported in recent times, so Microsoft still has work to do here. Indeed, the February patch for Windows 11 brought forth a new gremlin in the works of File Explorer which caused it to partially, or even totally, malfunction, and is a truly worrying glitch – one that will hopefully be fixed quickly.

As for the recommendations popping up here, these sorts of suggestions aren’t what everyone wants, as some folks feel it’s just more clutter. But if Microsoft is going to have these panels, I feel that the snap suggestions are a potentially handy addition – indeed this is another positive piece of work for the Start menu, which is, refreshingly, moving in a better direction of late – and the recommended section in File Explorer could be useful in a pinch, too.

As already noted, the important thing here is at least these features are trying to make life easier for the average Windows 11 user, and not attempting to push Microsoft’s various services on unsuspecting folks (although make no mistake, the latter is happening elsewhere in the OS all too often for my liking).

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