First Major Update to Windows 10 Coming in Early November

Windows 10 Fall update

The first big update to Windows 10 is coming in early November. And while it is not a massive update (like a Service Pack would be) it still contains a lot of changes and fixes. Most of them we feel will be welcomed by most Windows 10, and some won’t even be noticable.

Here are some of the changes and fixes coming in the Windows 10 Fall Update to be released in early November. The update will be distributed via Windows Update.

Windows 10 Fall Update: Changes

1. Start tiles support jump lists.
2. Desktop tiles can have their own color and you may show three or four medium tiles per group now.
3. Additional Cortana features: inked notes, track movies and ticketed events, missed phone calls, energy saving, syncing of messaging and calling history.
4. Microsoft Edge upgrades: improved HTML5 and CSS3 support, and ECMAScript 6 and 7 support, tab previews, Favorites and Reading List synchronization, F12 tools can be docked to the window, search engine setting in its own pane.
5. Locate your device with GPS and Location tracking.
6. Disallow apps to: access call history, access and send emails.
7. New Default apps: Skype Video, Messaging, Phone, Sway.
8. All built-in applications are updated to more recent versions.
9. Improved memory management.
10. Reworked Environmental Variables window.
11. Windows 10 can be activated with a Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 key during or after installation.

Windows 10 Fall Update: Fixes

1. Apps can be installed to other drives.
2. Option to define where offline maps are stored.
3. The color set under Personalization will include titlebars as well.
4. Improved and more consistent appearance of context menus and drop down menus.
5. Improved dark and light themes.
6. Cortana support for local accounts.
7. Start supports up to 2048 tiles after the update instead of just 512 which was causing some display issues.
8. Two windows snapped side by side can now be resized
9. The Control Panel’s Theme Settings have been reverted back to the Windows 8.1 style which gives you more options.

One thing that won’t be included in the Windows 10 Fall Update is changes to Windows Edge that would enable users to install add-ons and extensions (such as Roboform, LastPass, Readability, etc.). There are rumors that extension support in Microsoft Edge won’t come until sometime in 2016 – but there is no official word on that. So, until them, Edge won’t support you favorite extensions and add-ons.  Consider this when setting your default browser in Windows 10.  Windows 10’s default browser is Edge, but you can change it to Internet Explorer, or if you have other browsers like Chrome or Firefox installed, you can make one of them the default. We don’t recommend you use Edge as your default browser because it appears to be unfinished since it has no extension support and cannot render certain pages correctly – yet.