Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Microsoft has announced some changes to the Windows Insider program that will affect the Dev and Beta channels. Both channels will soon be “active development”, but they will be used to test different features for Windows 11.
Thus, the Dev channel will become an experimental branch where Microsoft can test features and ideas that may never make it to release. As before, builds from the Dev channel will not be linked to any feature update.
Dev channel. Designed for long-term development of features and functionality that may never be released. On this channel, Microsoft engineers will test concepts and gather feedback on ideas.
Beta channel. Designed to introduce you to features that are close to what Microsoft plans to release for its regular customers.
Release Preview channel. The best place to get acquainted with what will soon become available to ordinary users.
On the Dev channel, the same new feature can exist in multiple versions, each of which will be available to a specific group of insiders as part of A / B testing. Also, for some insiders, the new feature may simply be disabled. At the same time, Microsoft does not intend to document all the available options for innovation, so only one of the options will be described in publications about new builds.
As for the Beta channel, it is intended to test a set of features that Microsoft intends to release in the next version of Windows. As such, there will be no experimental changes on this channel, which means the builds will give a more accurate idea of what Microsoft plans to release.
And finally, Microsoft announced that from now on, some new features will be distributed using Feature, Web and Online Service Experience Packs separately from full builds of the operating system. In the future, this will be the main way to test new features. Major changes to the platform and internals will continue to be made in new builds of the OS.
The changes do not affect the Release Preview channel. It will continue to be used for final testing of the final build of a new version of Windows, which takes place approximately two weeks before the public release.
