Allrighty then. MS pushed a new Canary Channel version of Windows 11 out the door last Friday. I got it up and running over the weekend. It took a while to download and install, too — over an hour, though I didn’t exactly time it. As you can see from the lead-in graphic, Windows 11 version 26H1 comes via Canary Channel to Windows Insiders, courtesy of Build 28000.1.
What’s Driving 26H1 Comes Via Canary Channel?
The afore-linked announcement explains what’s really going on here. MS makes some interesting statements about the MS decision to break its three-years-and-running “H2-only” Window 11 update cadence (all bullets quoted verbatim):
- 26H1 is not a feature update for version 25H2…
- 25H2 remains the primary place for new features…
- …new experiences will continue to land first in the Dev and Beta channels, with Canary primarily focused on platform changes
What’s the real reason for the off-cycle 26H1 update? Qualcomm is readying its X2 family of Snapdragon CPUs for release. MS is going to accommodate new platform capabilities in this Canary channel release, along with other new stuff TBD.
Canary Breaks Away from Dev and Beta
Copilot sez (and my memory confirms, FWIW) that Build 28000 is the “first time a full version branch (26H1) has launched exclusively in Canary [channel], making the divergence more formal and strategic.” Hopefully that means there will be fun and interesting things to learn from Canary, different from things one might learn from Beta and Dev channel releases.
I’m currently not running a Dev release here at Chez Tittel, either on a physical PC or in a VM. Looks like I’ll have to do something about that. But things are always changing in Windows-World, and Insiders need to keep changing along with them. Tally-ho!
