Microsoft explains how its modernizing and fixing Windows 11

**Daniel Rubino** (0:13)
Welcome to The Windows Central Podcast, episode 400 for August 3rd, 2026 Hey, everyone, Zeno Rubino here, joining us, Zac Bowden, for another exciting episode of The Windows Central Podcast. Actually, it's a special episode. No Jez Corden this week. Don't worry, he will be returning. But this week, we're focusing a little bit more on Windows 11 Sorry, Windows 11 That's because we have a special guest this week. That is Marcus Ash from a corporate vice president at Microsoft, who oversees Windows 11 development and devices and engineering over there. And more importantly and specifically, he's basically leading the new Windows 11 Insider program, or at least acting as a liaison for it.
So we do have an interview. It's about 20 minutes that will be showing up during this broadcast. You guys can chime in some really interesting stuff. We had a bunch of questions. Of course, Marcus is one of those people we can speak to all day about this, but we had to kind of keep it short, at least for our standards.
Zac, how are you doing on this? Fine. We're doing this on a Monday, which is pretty rare, but definitely interesting time.

**Zac Bowden** (1:20)
Yeah, really, really good. I've had a great day waiting around for the postman to arrive because I was excitedly waiting for my Galaxy Fold 8, which has literally only arrived in the last hour or so. So I'm still sort of in the process of setting up. But I can give my full-on impressions later in the show on this device. It is so different. It's so cool.

**Daniel Rubino** (1:40)
Nice. I won't get mine until at least Friday. I mistook. I thought it was arriving next week. Finally got the box after day delay, opened it up and it was a wireless charger.
Like where are the rest? Then I checked and it's like, oh, we're still preparing for shipment. So not as lucky as the UK people, but that's okay. I'll have mine as well and we'll share more thoughts on that towards the end of the podcast, as well as next week when I get mine or the week after.
Besides the podcast, I should mention, we'll have a few other topics we'll be talking about, and we'll be getting to those actually right now. Zac, do you want to lead us into that discussion? Specifically, the other news around Windows 11 that also came out last week?

**Zac Bowden** (2:24)
Yeah. Since I didn't do the podcast last week, I figured I'd do a quick recap of some of the Windows 11 stories that were floating around last week, starting with context menus. Context menus are always an interesting topic of conversation for Windows fans. Windows 11's context menus are weird. A lot of people don't like them. There was an attempt to modernize and streamline them with the debut of Windows 11
And at the time, that made sense, right? With the context menus on Windows 10 were very inconsistent, and they were very bloated and long lists and stuff. And so Windows 11, the goal was to sort of streamline, make them much lighter, make them less cluttered. But over the last few years, we've seen the context menus on Windows 11 become the same as they were on Windows 10, and in some cases worse, because a lot of people find that the new context menus are actually slower, now that there's a lot more action items and lists and stuff within the context menus themselves. When I say context menus, I'm talking about the ones that appear in File Explorer and on the desktop, the Windows system native ones. And so I've been following Windows K2 quite closely, as you might imagine, and context menus have come up quite a lot within the context menu documentation. And I've since been able to confirm that Microsoft is actually working on essentially an overhaul to the context menu system on Windows 11 There's sort of been hints of this throughout the last six months, where Microsoft has mentioned different designs and sort of split views and whatnot. But as far as I'm aware, Microsoft is essentially working on a compact menu design that takes up less space on the screen, so there's less items within it, so it loads a lot faster. But not just that, they're also working on a new customization feature for the context menu. So users will be able to go into the Windows settings app and actually choose which items and which order of those items appear within the context menu. So for example, if you have, say, 7-Zip installed but you don't actually want to see 7-Zip in your context menu, you can hide it now or you will be able to hide it in the new context menu design. Same thing for anything that appears within the context menu. Editing and photos is another option I see there quite often. There's so many extra features and functions within the context menu that a lot of people don't use, and they're just automatically added whenever you install an app.