Keeping in line with its tight weekly schedule, Microsoft Insider team has released yet another Windows 10 preview build for users in the Fast Ring. This build, numbered 14936, brings along with some flashy new extensions for Edge browser, authentication changes for NAS devices and home file servers connectivity and a subsystem update for Linux.
Microsoft is now working with more browser extension partners to expand the scope of its Edge browser. Thus, today’s release brings alsongwith it some new extensions for Insiders to test and provide feedback on before publishing to the general public.
These include Turn Off the Lights, an add-in for a more comfortable video experience; Tampermonkey, a popular userscript manager to help you customize content across the web; and Microsoft Personal Shopping Assistant, a tool to help you collect your browsed products and set price alerts for them.
In addition, Microsoft has also made authentication changes to resolve vulnerabilities that allowed hackers with elevated permissions to target systems via arbitary code execution. So, in this build, shared devices on your home network are no longer available for access via your home network folder. You may have also noticed that mapped network drives are also not available, but you can it work again by changing your network to ‘private’ or ‘enterprise’.
Finally, one of the biggest changes introduced in this build include Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which will now install Ubuntu version 16.04 (Xenial) instead of Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty). This change, however, will not automatically affect existing instances with Trusty, but only apply to Insiders installing new instances (lxrun.exe /install or first run of bash.exe). You can use the do-release-upgrade command to update to the Xenial image.
In addition to new features and improvements, the Insider team has also squashed some insistent bugs in this build. The team has fixed issues with the Narrator — to stop it from continually speaking the progress of a song, usage of tab key to navigate within the Setting app, and lastly a bug which resulted in Explorer.exe frequently crashing for some Insiders, particularly for those with multiple network switches.
Known Issues
Alongside updates and improvement in each preview build iteration, we also have some known issues and bugs that make their way into the code. Here’s a complete list, as it appears in the official blogpost:
- Optional components may not work after upgrading to this build. To get it working again, go to “Turn Windows features on or off”, scroll down and check the right optional component and click ok. After a reboot, the optional component will be enabled again.
- Tencent apps and games will cause your PC to bugcheck(bluescreen) — again.
- Running sfc /scannow in an elevated command prompt will fail at 20% with the error ‘could not perform the requested operation.’
