Microsoft has released a new set of preview builds for the Windows 11 operating system across various preview channels, including a wide package of improvements and new features aimed at enhancing accessibility, privacy management, and the overall user and developer experience.
At the forefront of these updates is the major development applied to the Magnifier tool for users who rely on multiple displays; the tool no longer extends a single magnified view across all screens, but can now save customized and independent zoom ratios for each individual display. Thanks to this update, the typing screen can be set to 300 percent while the reference screen remains at 150 percent without overlapping display boundaries.
What does the Magnifier and visual tools update provide?
In addition to independent zoom for each display, Microsoft added the Viewport Locking feature to freeze the content of a specific screen while moving the pointer, alongside a new contrast theme aimed at reducing annoying glare without negatively affecting the true colors of images, videos, and charts, unlike the traditional color inversion option.
In a related context, the new preview builds introduced improvements to Windows Search powered by the WinUI 3 interface to provide fast and direct actions, as well as the development of Live Captions to give users complete control over the source of the audio to be transcribed, whether it is system audio, the microphone, or both together.
Permission management and Microsoft cloud storage
On the privacy front, the preview update allows users for the first time to manage camera, microphone, and location permissions for desktop applications individually, application by application, after management was previously restricted to a general setting covering the entire device.
The update also addresses cloud storage settings for Microsoft 365 Family subscribers, adding a section within the Settings app to display the size of the used shared space, in parallel with the future trend to reduce shared OneDrive storage capacity within the package according to subscription renewal time schedules.