Microsoft’s Windows Insider program has been amazingly successful with the company seeing millions of people join. The Insider program is typically broken into multiple rollout rings which you can opt into, based on your appetite for risk and interruption to your life.
As new builds are developed internally at Microsoft they reach a status known as Canary, similar to Google’s Canary build for Chrome, this is a daily build. Once a build passes internal QA checks, it can proceed to rollout to the first ring of Windows Insiders, the first people outside Microsoft to test it.
Once the first ring provide feedback and Microsoft are comfortable its been refined, or has no showstopping bugs, it then proceeds from the fast ring to slow ring, before eventually becoming a new official build released to the world.
Overnight something went wrong and an internal Build of Windows 10 (build 18947) was being pushed to all Windows Insiders, regardless of the ring you had chosen. The usual process sees a new build spent between 5 and 7 days before it rolls out to Fast Ring Insiders.
That’s the bad thing, but already it looks like Microsoft are resolving that error. That means those people who had downloaded it, have started seeing things Microsoft wasn’t ready for the world to see.
Head of the Windows Insider Program, Dona Sarkar simply posted this in response to feedback about the incorrect release. Before we get to the fun stuff, this should never have happened and this build may contain bugs that contain security issues, or issues that could create data loss, so tread very carefully (or roll back) if you care about the machine you have it on.
An example of one of the big new changes in this development build is some brand new approaches to UI in Windows.
Windows Central have a great video run down of the new Windows 10 Start Menu, just remember we may never see this ship, development builds are sometimes used as a technique to explore new ideas, but then again, it just might.
There’s also some great posts on Twitter that are finding all the new corners of the build. Leave a comment if you find any gems and we’ll update the post.
The main theme of the new UI direction that includes a brand new start menu (also in tablet mode) that moves to icons over live tiles.
