Canary Build 25977 now animates the Wi-Fi icon in the taskbar

Canary Build 25977 was released to the Windows Insider Program, and the build comes with some important new features, changes, and improvements.

While most of the new features were already documented, such as the Bluetooth LE Audio announced by Microsoft earlier this year, it seems that there was a new addition to the build, undocumented at first, but spotted right after the installation.

Canary Build 25977 now offers an animated experience to the Internet connection icons in the Windows 11 taskbar. Spotted by Windows enthusiast, @XenoPanther, the icon will now display an animation when connecting to the internet. It might be a small change, but it’s quite important, as it makes Windows 11 come alive.

Windows 11 users won’t have to do anything to enable this animation, as it will happen automatically once the updates are installed. And given that the animation is in the Canary channel, it won’t take long until it hits the general Windows 11.

Canary Build 25977: All the new features, changes, and improvements

As we mentioned earlier, Bluetooth LE Audio is making its way to aid hearing devices, improving the all-around accessibility on Windows 11. The operating system will also have new controls to let users manage their locations and Wi-Fi networks. Plus, SMB over QUIC now supports additional access control options for clients.

Check out the complete list of changes, and improvements coming with Canary Build 25977.

[General]

• Starting with this build, Mail and Calendar will no longer be installed after doing a clean install using the provided ISOs here. This ONLY applies for clean installs of Build 25977 and higher in the Canary Channel today. Mail and Calendar will not be removed on upgrade for Insiders in the Canary Channel. You can click here to learn more about the future of Mail and Calendar in Windows.

[Start menu]

• The Xbox Game Bar will now show as just Game Bar under the Start menu and also under Settings > System > System Components. This change will come through a Game Bar update via the Microsoft Store.

[Taskbar & System Tray]

• [ADDED] The network icon in the system tray now animates when a connection is in progress. This animation replaces the disconnected globe when a network is taking time to establish internet.

[Input]

• We are including two new keyboard layouts in this flight. These keyboards implement the two new German extended layout standards (E1 and E2). The extended layouts allow users to type all characters needed for German (including German quotations marks, which were not previously available), all Latin-based languages of the EU, Greek, IPA phonetic transcription, Egyptian hieroglyph transcription, most Latin-based languages of the entire world (including Vietnamese with its multiple accents per character), and more. To enable one of these layouts, go to Settings > Time & language > Language & region and select Language options under the ellipsis for the language you would like to use this keyboard with. On the Options page, select “Add a keyboard” and look for the new keyboard layouts “German Extended (E1)” or “German Extended (E2)”. For more information, visit this Wikipedia page.

[Settings]

• In Settings, when looking at your Wi-Fi password under the Wi-Fi properties, we now show a QR code so you can more easily share it with others. We also show a QR code when you set up a mobile hotspot to share your network connection.

Fixes for known issues

• Fixed an underlying issue believed to be the root cause of various games having issues launching (citing graphics issues) or changing resolution in Build 25967.
• Did some work to help improve performance when expanding the navigation pane in Task Manager.
• Fixed an issue where certain .rar files would open blank or with an unexpected message saying there was insufficient memory to open the file.

Known issues

• [NEW] Using dictation in voice access makes voice access crash.
• We’re working on the fix for an issue causing the print queue to no longer be accessible and showing an error when you try to open it.
• Some popular games may not work correctly on the most recent Insider Preview builds in the Canary Channel. Please be sure to submit feedback in Feedback Hub on any issues you see with playing games on these builds.

You can check out Microsoft’s latest blog post on the build, by accessing this link.