Microsoft overhauled the Start Menu in Windows 11, giving it a new center-aligned grid design and better organization. There’s another change on the way: suggested links to websites.
Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25247 to the Dev Channel of the Windows Insider program. It includes some of the changes we’ve seen in other testing channels, like a search bar in Task Manager and cloud storage information in the Settings app. However, there’s also a change to the Start Menu in testing, where websites are displayed in the “Recommended” section alongside recent documents.
Microsoft said in a blog post, “We’ve been working on adding more valuable content to the Recommended section in Start and are excited to introduce a new content type: websites. For the first phase, we will recommend common websites based on your region or browsing history to help you easily get back to the websites you care about.”
You can right-click on a website to hide it from the Start Menu, and there’s also an option to remove sites from the Start Menu entirely. This is unrelated from installing web apps to the Start Menu (using Edge, Chrome, or some other browsers), which appear in the app list, not the Recommended section.
Showing a website or two in the Recommended section might be helpful, at least for people who use Microsoft Edge as their main browser — it doesn’t seem to read the history from other browsers. However, it could make a turn for the worse if Microsoft decides to use it for advertising. Web browsers like Edge and Firefox already show advertisements in the form of “recommended” sites and articles, and as we’ve learned from the Windows search page, Microsoft isn’t afraid to jam a few advertisements into core Windows features.
Source: Windows Blog
