It’s a balmy Wednesday morning, and what does that mean? That a new Windows 10 build is upon us. This one is a little different, because build 19628 is from the release branch.
But not for the usual reasons that you would expect.
That’s because build 19628 has been made available in the Fast ring, and it’s coming from the mn_release branch, rather than the rs_prerelease branch.
Typically, this happens when Microsoft is readying a feature update for release. It splits it into a separate branch, so that new features can be developed on the prerelease branch. But that’s not what is happening here.
The “mn” in the name stands for Manganese, which is the codename for 20H2. Yet, this is not actually that version, it’s nowhere near.
20H2 is said to be a small update in the form of an enablement package, just like the 19H2 release was.
There were rumors, though, that the 20H2 update was going to be exclusive to Windows 10X, but with this variant of the operating system now delayed, these builds are not going out to anyone. As a result, Microsoft has moved things over to the mn_release branch.
Because, you know, that’s how things work!
The team, most likely, wanted to test out switching between the development branches, hence this move. But at its core, this very much seems like a full feature update that is not getting released, only that its new features will be bundled into the update that arrives next spring.
Then again, the Windows team announced back in December that Windows 10 previews will no longer be tied to a specific development branch.
But now it appears that builds will be spun off into release branches.
The wonderful world of Windows development, ladies and gentlemen!
