Hi Windows Insiders, File Explorer is one of the most used experiences on Windows. It's where you get work done: organizing files, finding what you need, and moving content seamlessly across local storage and the cloud. Earlier this year, we shared our commitment to improving Windows quality, with a focus on performance, reliability, and craftsmanship. In File Explorer, that means investing in the foundational work needed to improve the experience end-to-end: reducing hangs and delays, improving responsiveness and reliability, addressing customer-reported issues, and removing friction from everyday tasks. But quality is also about continually evolving the experience to feel more modern, intuitive, and efficient for the millions of people who rely on File Explorer every day. Today we're sharing progress on both fronts. Alongside continued investments in File Explorer performance and reliability, we are introducing a substantially redesigned context menu experience that's faster, simpler, and more customizable than ever before. This new context menu experience is now rolling to Windows Insiders and represents one of several major improvements underway as we continue to modernize File Explorer.

Fewer bad moments

What people remember most are the worst moments. A single freeze while renaming a file, a slow right-click, or a Home view that flashes and reloads can outweigh dozens of smooth interactions. That reality has guided our approach to improving File Explorer. We focused on the everyday experiences people rely on most and set clear goals to make those interactions faster, more reliable, and less disruptive. Improving the moments that matter most We've profiled and invested in improving the performance and responsiveness of File Explorer. File Explorer now launches faster, and the overall experience feels more consistent and predictable. We’ve analyzed the issues behind many of the freezes, hangs, and delays users encounter, and eliminated dozens of potential stalls and interruptions in the experience.  As a result, you'll see fewer freezes and flashes when browsing, renaming files, navigating, or selecting multiple files. There are many more improvements to come, and these changes are designed to reduce disruptions and make File Explorer feel more responsive and reliable day to day.

Improving the details that matter every day

Our work extends beyond performance and reliability improvements. Many of the requests we hear from customers aren’t about major new features, they’re about the small interactions that happen every day.  We’ve continued refining File Explorer based on that feedback, removing friction and improving the details that help make everyday tasks feel more natural and predictable. For example, file renames no longer get interrupted by background file synchronization, and case-only filename changes now appear immediately. We’ve also improved navigation workflows.  The Address Bar now supports a wider range of inputs, including paths with quotation marks and double backslashes. Support for opening folders in a new tab with a middle-click has also been expanded to the Address Bar and Home page folders, making multitasking faster and more intuitive. Smaller usability improvements add up as well. Home now preserves whether sections are expanded or collapsed so you can pick up where you left off. File sizes are now displayed using appropriate units such as KB, MB, and GB, making them easier to understand at a glance. The Details pane has been reorganized so file properties are easier to find and review. Many of these improvements came directly from customer and Windows Insider feedback. They represent just the beginning of our ongoing effort to improve the everyday experiences people depend on most.

Putting you in control of the context menu

Right-clicking is one of the most common actions in Windows. If it doesn’t work as intended, or is difficult to navigate, it can derail your workflow. When we launched Windows 11, we introduced a new context menu with a modernized design, improved organization, and a new approach to application extensions. Over time, though, the menu became cluttered and sluggish, and we recognized the need to dramatically reduce the time between right-clicking and having a menu that’s fully ready to use. Today, we're excited to announce an updated context menu that delivers a faster, simpler, and more customizable experience. The new design reduces top-level clutter, keeps commonly used actions easy to access, and introduces a new Settings experience that gives you more control over what appears in the menu. [caption id="attachment_179130" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The new right-click menu.[/caption] Faster to open The first thing you'll notice is that the menu opens much more quickly. For something used as often as the context menu, speed is part of good design. A lot of that comes from behind-the-scenes engineering improvements, and a good part comes from a cleaner default menu, with the full set of options just a click away in Settings. Clutter isn't only a visual problem; it slows the menu down because every app that adds its own options can make the menu do extra work each time it opens. Your menu, your control Part of the broader push we’re making across Windows 11 is making the operating system calmer by default, with more personalization and control. Each person uses the context menu in different ways, so we’re adding more customization to allow you to choose the layout that works best for you. At the bottom of the new context menu, you’ll now find “Customize menu”, as a shortcut to its Settings page, where you can shape the menu around your preferences, your habits, or the years of muscle memory you’ve built with a specific configuration. [caption id="attachment_179131" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The new Context Menu page in the Settings app, under Personalization.[/caption] The top section lets you turn built-in Windows commands like Send to or Create shortcut on or off. Some of these commands, like Print, weren't available in the Windows 11 context menu before and can now be switched on if you want them. The next section is about options for app extensibility, so you can choose which app extensions appear in the main menu or submenu, including hiding the submenu altogether. Finally, the last section is about where the most common commands live. We know many people have years of muscle memory from the Windows 10 menu, so we've added options to bring that feel back. You can list the main commands (Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Delete, and Share) inline directly in the menu instead of as a row of icons, and you can move Properties down to the very bottom. As we continue refining this experience with Insider feedback, our goal is to make right-click feel more responsive, predictable, and personal.

Building a healthier File Explorer for the long term

We are committed to continue doing the hard work and consistently improving File Explorer month after month. Not every update will be obvious on its own, but together they should make File Explorer feel faster, polished, and more dependable across tasks users do most. Your feedback continues to shape every step of this journey. Keep it coming through Feedback Hub, and we'll continue sharing our progress as this work evolves. The File Explorer team

Hello Windows Insiders, Today, we’re releasing new Windows 11 Insider Preview builds to the Beta and Experimental Channels. This post also includes reminders about renewed flight certificates and the current Feature Flags settings issue in the Experimental channel. Renewed Windows Insider flight certificates As a reminder, all new builds include renewed Windows Insider flight certificates, replacing certificates that expired on August 11, 2026. Flight certificates are renewed periodically to help ensure Insider devices remain on supported builds and continue receiving future Windows Insider Preview updates. Devices that are not updated to a newer build with a current certificate may encounter compatibility issues with software such as anti-cheat applications. For more information, please visit the certificate renewal FAQ. Experimental Feature Flags We’re investigating an issue that causes the Feature Flags settings page to appear empty for Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel. We expect to resolve it in the next Experimental build and will share updates on the blog. New builds this week We’re releasing new Windows 11 Insider Preview builds today. Select your channel below to view its release notes:

• Beta: Build 26220.9209
• Experimental: Build 26340.9212

For those on other specific build versions, here are today’s new builds and release notes:

• Beta (26H1): Build 28020.2731
• Experimental (26H1): Build 28120.2738
• Experimental (Future Platforms): Build 29648.1000

Notable new features:

[File Explorer]

Release channel: Experimental Introducing the new, redesigned Context Menu in File Explorer

• We’re beginning to roll out an updated context menu experience in File Explorer, designed to feel faster, cleaner, and easier to tailor to the way you work. The new design reduces top-level clutter, keeps commonly used actions easy to access, and adds a new Settings experience that gives you more control over what appears in the menu. As we continue refining this experience with Insider feedback, our goal is to make right-click feel more responsive, predictable, and personal.

[caption id="attachment_179130" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The new right-click menu.[/caption]

[Emoji]

Release channel: Experimental

• We’re adding support for Emoji 17.0. This includes new emoji such as distorted face, fight cloud, and hairy creature. To try out the new emoji, you can press the Windows key plus Period (.) to open the emoji panel and insert them from there.

• As part of this effort, we’ve also made some slight adjustments the design of some of our current emoji to improve consistency across platforms. This includes the saluting face, face with peeking eye, goose, lotus, and kissing cat emoji.

Thanks, Stephen and the Windows Insider Program team

Last Updated on August 17, 2026 by Michael Morten Sonne Introduction I’m excited to share the next post…

The post Time for a new lab environment – Part 2 first appeared on Blog - Sonne´s Cloud.

OpenAI has signed a 10-year lease for an enormous Ohio data center that will eventually provide 8 gigawatts of computing capacity and require at least 10 gigawatts of new power generation. According to OpenAI, Nvidia will be supplying the chips and guaranteeing up to $105 billion in lease and power obligations. From the report: The facility -- which will be built and owned by SoftBank's SB Energy -- illustrates the immensity of the computing and power needed to fuel the growth of the AI economy. The data center will have 8 IT-gigawatts of computing capacity, powered by 10 gigawatts of new energy generation, on private land and federal property formerly used for uranium enrichment. Nvidia -- which will be the exclusive provider of chips to the site -- agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion in conditional lease and power payment obligations to SB Energy, according to an SEC filing (PDF). The so-called "land, power and shell" deal structure could allow for multiple upgrade cycles for new generations of Nvidia infrastructure at the site, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on X. A massive 9.2 gigawatts of new gas-fired power is ultimately envisioned for the Ohio project, which U.S. officials say Japan is funding under the 2025 trade and investment deal. SB Energy and SoftBank "will build at least 10 GW of new energy generation," a joint announcement from Nvidia, OpenAI and SB Energy states. Nvidia also said today that it's investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy to back its "continued evolution into a leading AI infrastructure developer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub, the Microsoft-owned code-sharing platform with 225 million users, was down for more than three hours Monday morning, disrupting software development work around the world.

The issue started at 6:40 a.m. Pacific. Within an hour and a half, nearly every part of the service was broken or slowed, including the GitHub website, tools for reviewing and merging code, the automated systems that test and ship software, and the GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant.

GitHub said on its status page that it found the source of the problem shortly after 9:30 a.m. and by 10 a.m. had the outage under control, with services recovering. Copilot remained listed as an active incident and GitHub said it was still monitoring things overall for stability.

As of publication time, the company hadn’t detailed the cause of the issue.

GitHub has been struggling for many months with the surge of AI-driven coding. GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov wrote in April that the company set out last fall to expand its capacity tenfold, then concluded by February that it needed to build for 30 times its current scale.

In June, a Microsoft spokesperson told Business Insider that the spike in AI agent development had tested GitHub’s infrastructure limits, and said the company was accelerating GitHub’s move onto Azure while pursuing a multi-cloud strategy. BI reported that the strategy includes renting capacity from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s biggest cloud rival.

When I was in college, I joined the beta for one of the first versions of AI inline completions in VS Code. It felt like a game changer. Since then, GenAI has fundamentally changed software development: hybrid teams where agents and humans work in tandem, with the developer at the center as visionary and orchestrator. We are living in that transition right now.

As a natural byproduct of how fast innovation in GenAI has moved, we now have tools to help us plan, build, review, and ship code. But in the current state, many workflows still feel disjointed. Context gets lost across threads and surfaces, and too much time gets spent reviewing agent-generated work. Agents can produce changes faster than any human can review them, and most developer tools were not originally designed for multi-agent orchestration. It becomes easy to lose track of what ran, what changed, what was validated, and what still needs human judgment.

The GitHub Copilot app is a major step toward addressing this. One feature in particular that I’ve learned to love and use almost every day is canvases. Canvases let developers and agents interact on a durable, shared surface. Instead of treating chat as the only place where work happens, canvases make work visible, steerable, and approvable as it unfolds.

Chat is great for intent, but weak for durable execution

I still believe chat is one of the best interfaces we have for intent. It’s where you can think, refine, and direct. It’s fast and flexible, especially when the problem is still ambiguous.

But once an agent starts doing real work, chat becomes a long scroll of instructions, logs, pivots, and corrections. The important parts are technically there, but buried: the plan, decision points, validations, and approval moments. If you have to reconstruct all of that from history, you’re already paying a coordination tax.

Canvases solve that by giving workflows a home. They make state explicit and persistent. Humans can inspect and guide. Agents can update and progress. Both can stay aligned without constantly replaying context.

The first build: Java Modernization Studio

One of the first canvases I built was Java Modernization Studio. Java modernization is exactly the kind of workflow where visibility and governance matter: assessment, planning, migration tasks, validation gates, and readiness to ship.

In a chat-only experience, those steps blur together. You can still move forward, but it gets harder to audit and harder to trust at scale, especially with multiple contributors. Teams keep asking the same expensive questions: What stage are we in? What decisions were made? What is blocked? What still needs human approval?

The studio made each phase explicit and inspectable. Instead of parsing narrative history, teams could see operational state directly. Instead of guessing what happened, they could verify it. Human reviewers could focus on high-signal judgments while agents kept execution moving between checkpoints.

Explore the Java Modernization Studio canvas >

The second build: Site Studio

After that, I built Site Studio for a very different workflow: creating and managing personal site content. It’s content-heavy rather than migration-heavy, but the orchestration challenge is similar: section progress, iterative edits, review loops, and status transitions.

In a chat-only flow, content can drift quickly. A section gets revised, then revised again, and confidence drops in what is current. Feedback gets scattered, drafts repeat, and momentum slows because each iteration starts by rebuilding context.

Site Studio keeps that state durable. Section status is visible. Draft values are persisted as work happens. Human review points are explicit. The agent can keep moving while the human can steer, approve, or redirect without losing the thread.

Explore the Site Studio canvas >

The repeatable pattern

Across both canvases, I found the same repeatable blueprint:

1. Define workflow states clearly.
2. Surface the decisions that matter.
3. Persist progress and drafts immediately.
4. Keep explicit human approval points.

This shifts the model from prompt-by-prompt interaction to durable collaborative workflows. You stop treating each turn like a fresh start and start treating each workflow like a system with memory, structure, and control.

Cost and efficiency: yes, canvases are an investment

I also want to be explicit about cost: canvases can be an investment. For instance, Site Studio cost me about 2,000 AI credits, and the modernization canvas cost me about 3,000 AI credits. They take effort to design and shape well.

But in the long run, especially for repeated workflows, that investment pays back. Durable surfaces reduce repeated prompting, reduce context loss, reduce unnecessary back-and-forth, and reduce rework. Over time, that can save both time and money while improving trust and throughput.

So for me, this is not “spend more tokens for nicer UX.” It’s “invest in better workflow architecture so recurring work becomes more efficient, predictable, and governable.”

Available now in awesome-copilot

The canvases I built—Java Modernization Studio and Site Studio—are available in awesome-copilot for anyone who wants to use them, adapt them, or learn from them.

If you are already using Copilot agents, a practical next step is to pick one repeated workflow and build a minimal canvas around it with /create-canvas. Start small, run real work, and iterate from actual usage. If it helps your team, contribute it back to awesome-copilot so others can benefit too.

We’re still early in this transition, but the direction is clear. Agents can accelerate execution. Humans provide vision, judgment, and accountability. Canvases are one way to make that partnership real, durable, and scalable.

The post How canvases make agentic workflows visible, steerable, and cost-efficient appeared first on The GitHub Blog.