One too many twos here, but this is exciting news, so we’ll let this slide! That’s because there are signs that users rocking the original 21H2 release of Windows 11 may be getting in on some 22H2 action.
In other words, don’t be surprised to see certain newer additions in the older, vanilla version of the OS.
This is being suggested by leaksters and users alike after discovering new features in their current 21H2 builds.
A feature that you may be familiar with is one of the first ones to make the apparent jump. I’m talking about the new Search button styles in the Taskbar that Microsoft added to the platform back in July with the arrival of build 25158 in the Dev channel of its preview program.
As can be seen below, this particular feature has shown up all of a sudden in a 21H2 build:
I suddenly received the new search button in the taskbar on Windows 11 21H2 pic.twitter.com/mbxtLWTzWA
— Mauro Huculak (@Pureinfotech) October 4, 2022
This news spread like wildfire, and other leaksters picked up on it, including one that goes by the cool as ice alias of PhantomOcean3, who found out that Microsoft had indeed brought in under-the-hood changes like these to Windows 11 22H2.
The screengrabs below show the three different taskbar Search styles in Windows 11 21H2 build 22000.1042 (KB5017383) alongside the winver dialog box that shows the build number.
It certainly seems like Microsoft is interested in bringing a selection of these features to older versions of the Windows 11 OS, as well. This was not always the case with the previous operating systems as almost all of the notable new changes were reserved for the latest release.
And since these additions are still being tested, they remain hidden for now.
You can enable the new Taskbar search styles on your machine in Windows 11 build 22000.142 by using the ViveTool utility. Just extract it, run Terminal with Administrator privileges, and execute the following command by navigating to the folder containing ViveTool.
vivetool /enable /id:39263329 /variant:X (1, 3 or 5)
Restart your computer, if you want, to enable your choice of Search button style in the Taskbar.
