Microsoft releases new Windows 10 preview with light theme, improvements to snipping and printing

Microsoft today released a new Windows 10 preview with a light theme and improvements to snipping, printing, Windows Update, brightness, and Narrator. This build is from the 19H1 branch, which will arrive in the first half of next year.

Windows 10 is being developed as a service, meaning it receives new features on a regular basis. Microsoft has released six major updates so far: November Update, Anniversary Update, Creators Update, Fall Creators Update, April 2018 Update, and October 2018 Update.

Given all the focus on dark themes as of late, Microsoft wants to show light theme fans some love. With this build, the taskbar, Start menu, Action Center, touch keyboard, and so on will get lighter if you so choose (Settings => Personalization => Colors => Light). There’s also a new default wallpaper (shown above) to match.

Snip & Sketch has received a window snip mode. The new experience is available for 50 percent of Insiders, for now.

Printing has also gotten better. The modern print dialog supports the light theme, of course, but also the printing options now include icons and some dropdown settings have line description. If you have a long printer name, it will now wrap rather than being cut off.

Windows Update has gained two improvements: Pause Updates and Intelligent Active Hours. The former is now directly on the page (Settings => Update and Security => Windows Update) page. The latter means Windows can automatically adjust active hours for you based on your device activity (Settings => Update and Security => Windows Update => Change active hours).

As for brightness, you know when you plug your device in and the display brightness changes? Windows 10 will now remember your display brightness setting whether you’re using battery power or a charger.

Finally, Narrator has gained improvements to verbosity (options to hear advanced information or not), reading (fewer errors), Read by Sentence Braille support, and character phonetic reading optimization.

Bug fixes and known issues

This 19H1 build includes the following general bug fixes and improvements:

• Fixed an issue causing File Explorer to freeze when interacting with video files in the last few flights.
• Fixed an issue resulting in certain x86 apps and games having blurry text rendering in the last few flights, where the text appeared to have a shadow.
• If you were seeing certain games fail to launch with an error citing unexpected kernel modification detected, please check the games for available updates.
• When you hover over the navigation pane in Start, after a short period it will now automatically expand. This is something that a portion of Insiders have had for a little bit now, and is now rolling out to all Insiders.
• Added a shadow to Action Center, to match the shadow seen along the borders of our other taskbar flyouts.
• Fixed an issue resulting in some users not being able to set Win32 program defaults for certain app and file type combinations using the Open with… command or via Settings > Apps > Default apps.
• Fixed an issue resulting in the context menu not coming up when right-clicking an open app in Task View.
• Fixed an issue resulting in the touch keyboard not working correctly when trying to type Chinese with the Bopomofo IME.
• Some improvements in the Narrator and Chrome browser experience.
• Narrator Scan Mode will more reliability toggle off when a user reaches the Word Online canvas, making it easier to type.
• Fixed a race condition resulting in blue screens if your PC was set up to dual boot in recent builds.
• Fixed an issue resulting in some Insiders experiencing a PDC_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT bug check / green screen on resume from hibernate.
• Fixed an issue resulting in the Network button on the sign-in screen not working recently.
• Fixed an issue resulting in some users noticing the update status cycling between Getting Things Ready, Downloading, and Installing (often accompanied with error 0x8024200d caused by a failed express package download).
• Updated the Start and Taskbar jump lists to now have a touch of Fluent Design.

Today’s update bumps the Windows 10 build number for the 19H1 branch from 18277 (made available to testers on November 7) to build 18282.

This build has seven known issues:

• PDFs opened in Microsoft Edge may not display correctly (small, instead of using the entire space).
• The hyperlink colors need to be refined in Dark Mode in Sticky Notes if the Insights are enabled.
• Settings page will crash after changing the account password or PIN (use the CTRL + ALT + DEL method instead).
• Due to a merge conflict, the settings for enabling/disabling Dynamic Lock are missing from Sign-in Settings.
• Settings crashes when clicking on the “View storage usage on other drives” option under System > Storage.
• Remote Desktop will only show a black screen for some users.
• If you install any of the recent builds from the Fast ring and switch to the Slow ring – optional content such as enabling developer mode will fail. You will have to remain in the Fast ring to add/install/enable optional content. This is because optional content will only install on builds approved for specific rings.

As always, don’t install this on your production machine.