Microsoft Windows 10 Redstone 5 Insider Preview Brings HDR Controls And Fluent Design Drop Shadows

Microsoft has just rolled out a brand-new Windows Insider preview build for those running on the Fast Ring. This release is build number 17711, and is part of the upcoming Redstone 5 release, expected to become available this fall. In it, a number of quality improvements have been made, especially with regards to HDR control, and also the Edge web browser.

For starters, Edge has seen a couple of nice improvements, including the ability to customize your Reading View with different themes, in the event one happens to be easier on your eyes, or just looks better. The credential auto-fill feature has also been refined, making it easier to understand what it's going to do when a user is prompted to save their information. Tying into this, the actual discovery ability of the feature has also been improved, so if you haven't been promoted with a dialog in the past as you expected to be, that issue will hopefully be no more.

With 17711, Microsoft also adds some Fluent Design polish, making Windows 10 look just a little bit better in very subtle ways. To make menu pop-ups more prominent, for example, drop shadows have been added to select menus, like the one in Edge seen below. This update isn't going to be a blanket one, encompassing every Windows pop-up menu, but Insiders will notice the shadow more and more as time goes on.

On the HDR front, a thorn in many user sides have been that the HDR control on Windows has been less-than-ideal, but with Redstone 5, you'll be able to simply enable and disable the feature whenever you want, and independently adjust whether or not streaming HDR video is possible. Fortunately, you can also adjust this on a display-by-display basis, if you happen to have more than one hooked up.

This only scratches the surface of the updates seen in build 17711, though most everything else is related to general polish or bug fixes. It is worth noting that even the registry editor got an update, however, allowing users to easily type out their destination in a drop-down console. It's a minor update, but at the same time, it's nice to see legacy Windows tools finally getting some quality attention.