Microsoft Improves File Explorer in Windows 11
Microsoft is working on significant improvements to File Explorer in Windows 11, aiming to make it faster and reduce clutter in its interface. These changes appeared in the latest developer preview builds and include a preloading feature that will help improve file opening speed, especially on less powerful devices.
The company explains that preloading will make File Explorer more responsive when needed, while users can still disable this feature if they prefer. This move follows Microsoft's success with a similar approach to speed up the opening of Office applications like Word through a background task that runs at system startup.
Microsoft has also improved the context menu within File Explorer, reducing the clutter of options and moving less frequently used actions to submenus. New changes include a pop-up window for managing files, which includes options such as compressing files to ZIP, copying paths, setting images as wallpapers, or rotating them. Cloud storage options have also been separated into a separate window that includes a "Send to my phone" option.
These changes aim to make the context menu clearer and easier to use, highlighting the most common actions and hiding secondary options without canceling them. These changes are currently being tested in the developer channel and are expected to be rolled out to all Windows 11 users in early 2026.