Microsoft's making some major changes to File Explorer and the context menu in order to resolve quality issues and offer more user flexibility when you right click. 

"Windows" and "quality" are rarely used positively together, something Microsoft admitted this year. Even the company's boss, Satya Nadella, noted that the company needed to "win back" its fans.

For many Windows users, the face of the operating system is File Explorer, and the application has suffered from feature overload, poorly thought-through design choices, and a general feeling of instability and sluggishness.

"What people remember most are the worst moments," wrote Microsoft, "A single freeze while renaming a file, a slow right-click, or a Home view that flashes and reloads can outweigh dozens of smooth interactions."

It is true that complaints are usually louder than compliments, although (at the risk of metaphor overload) there is rarely smoke without fire.

According to Microsoft, it has spent the last few months tinkering with File Explorer, working through the mystery freezes and workflow disruptions, and making the tool more usable overall.

However, the Context Menu has had perhaps a bigger visible overhaul in a shorter time.

Available in the Experimental Windows Insider Channel, the update reflects Microsoft's efforts to undo the last few years of bloat that made the menu "cluttered and sluggish".

Still got your Windows 10 muscle memory? No problem – Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Delete, and Share can be inline if you want. Missing a Print command? That can be there. Send to or Create shortcut utterly pointless? Again, they can be turned off.

We checked out the new menu on a sacrificial PC and found the options useful. Where the context menu had indeed become a bloated mess over the years, it was now simple to tweak it to meet the user's needs rather than the operating system's. Heck, even Copilot wasn't front and center unless requested (although our installation got a bit unhappy about Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot, and some PowerToys iconography wasn't present – this is the Experimental Channel after all.)

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Microsoft's changes is an admission that, hey, maybe things were better left alone. The company recently pushed the movable Taskbar (dropped in Windows 11) into Release Preview and, for users who were happier with the Windows 10 way of doing things in the context menu, "we've added options to bring that feel back."

Perhaps, somewhere deep in the bowels of Redmond, an engineer has dusted off that adage: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

Or at least struck out, "Or keep fixing it until it's broke." ®