Microsoft recently confirmed the development of a new context menu for Windows 11, which comes after continuous efforts by the company to improve the user experience when right-clicking on files or folders.
According to Microsoft itself, this new menu was specifically designed for File Explorer with the goal of making it faster, more sophisticated, and more reliable for users' most frequent operations.
Marcus Ash, responsible for Windows design and research, had anticipated these modifications in June of this year. In one of the images released by the company, basic commands such as cut, copy, rename, share, and delete remain visible at the top of the menu, maintaining their utility.
However, the options located further down have been simplified, which not only makes the menu easier to use but also improves its overall performance. The most notable feature, according to the text, is the addition of a personalization option at the end of the menu.
Through this customization tool, users can choose to enable or disable the display of certain functions and buttons. Furthermore, it is possible to define which programs will have their features displayed in the context menu, which is advantageous since many of these features appear automatically after installation, without explicit user consent.
For those who prefer the previous interface, there is also a customization option that allows restoring the original context menu. Even without making any changes, users can notice significant improvements, as Microsoft claims to have optimized the feature as a whole.
Michael Novak, a software engineer at Microsoft, detailed that the reasons behind crashes, slowness, and freezes reported by users were analyzed, resulting in the elimination of numerous bugs that hindered navigation, file selection, or switching. Consequently, it is expected that there will be fewer flickers and interruptions when using the system.
Currently, Microsoft releases new Windows 11 features first in Windows Insider builds. The new context menu follows this pattern and is accessible in the Experimental channel of the testing program. Although there is no set date for its implementation in the final version of Windows 11, Microsoft has committed to refining various aspects of the operating system by the end of 2026, with the context menu being one of the potential focus areas for this improvement.