Microsoft announces Windows 10 20H1 Build 18956 with network and notification improvements

Last week, Microsoft released Build 18950 to Insiders on the Fast ring, and it’s fair to say it wasn’t the most exciting of releases with the headline addition covering Japanese IME improvements.

Today’s new flight, Build 18956, is much more interesting with a redesigned Network Status page, notification settings improvements, and Calculator and Cortana app updates.

The revamped Network & Internet landing page in Settings aims to deliver more information about your device’s connectivity, with a new view of active connections, and integrated data usage.

Notification settings improvements have been available to some Insiders previously, but are now rolling out to all on the Fast ring. Improvements here include:

• If you hover your mouse over an incoming notification, you’ll now see a settings icon to make it easy to adjust that app’s notification settings.
• The design of the per-app notification settings have been updated for visual clarity.
• There’s now a direct link to notification settings at the top of the Action Center.
• Notifications & Action Settings now has a checkbox for muting the sound of all notifications.
• By default, the senders in Notifications & Action Settings are now sorted by "most recently sent a notification."

50 percent of Insiders with their language set to English (United States) will now have access to the new Cortana experience, and the over the next few days, Insiders will also begin to receive a Calculator app update with a useful Always on Top mode.

Other general changes, improvements, and fixes in this build include:

• Microsoft is in the process of returning Tamper Protection to being on by default for all Insiders. You’ll see this change reflected on your PC across the next few weeks.
• Fixed an issue where, if snipping via Print Screen was enabled, certain UI would unexpectedly dismiss before it could be captured in the snip.
• Fixed an issue resulting in the touch keyboard button not launching the touch keyboard on certain devices.
• Fixed an issue where, if you dragged File Explorer while the search dropdown was visible, the dropdown could end up disconnected from the search box.
• Fixed an issue where, if a search was in progress in File Explorer, then it’d take two clicks on the X to clear the search results.
• Fixed an issue where using the "Automatically type into Search Box" view setting would result in the first letter of your File Explorer search being dropped.
• Fixed an issue where File Explorer recent searches weren’t disabled when the group policy "Turn off display of recent search entries in the File Explorer search box" was enabled.
• Fixed an issue where explorer.exe would crash when searching File Explorer starting in a OneDrive folder if OneDrive was not running.
• Fixed an issue where Homegroup options might still appear in the "Give access to" File Explorer context menu entry, despite the Homegroup feature no longer being available.
• Fixed an issue resulting in some Insiders experiencing a taskbar search crash right after log-in.

Known Issues are:

• There has been an issue with older versions of anti-cheat software used with games where after updating to the latest 19H1 Insider Preview builds may cause PCs to experience crashes. Microsoft is working with partners on getting their software updated with a fix, and most games have released patches to prevent PCs from experiencing this issue.
• Some Realtek SD card readers are not functioning properly.
• Occasionally, the candidate selection in prediction candidate window for the Japanese IME doesn’t match with the composition string.
• When connected via cellular, the Network status will be incorrect, but the device is able to use the connection.

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