A great feature won't make it to Microsoft Teams, at least anytime soon. Microsoft began testing two minimized views in Teams earlier this year, but development of the features has been paused.

The idea was that when an active meeting window was minimized, Teams would show a minimized window with shortcuts to perform actions like raising your hand or sharing a reaction. One option called Expanded view showed up to four participant videos, while the Compact view focused on quick actions and settings.

"Updated July 7, 2026: We have paused release to GA at this time. We will communicate via Message center when we are ready to proceed. Thank you for your patience," reads the Microsoft 365 Message Center (archived here).

The views were meant to start rolling out in May 2026, but they now sit stuck in the development pipeline. Neowin spotted that the feature was paused.

There's always a chance that preview features will be changed significantly before release or cancelled. Microsoft also needs to work out any issues before shipping a change to Teams.

Microsoft did not share why it paused the development of these minimized views. They both seem like worthwhile additions to Teams that make multitasking easier. I hope Microsoft ships them to Teams eventually.

Teams gets new features regularly. The communication platform gets so many updates that Microsoft has to list changes in a monthly blog post.

But the most talked about Teams feature this year was omitted from the last roundup. Teams now has a controversial feature that lets your boss see where you are if you're connected to Wi-Fi networks at work.

Microsoft was accused of making Teams a "lapdog for your boss," but the company has made changes to the feature since first unveiling it. Microsoft delayed the rollout of that feature, changed the name of the option, and added better privacy controls.

The minimized views within Teams may go through a similar journey. We could see them in the future with altered controls, a new name, or in the same form but at a later date.

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I've heard the term slop bandied around more times than I'd like recently, but today was the first time I'd heard it in the context of Amazon shopping. Meet Knockoff Shopping, the Chrome extension that de-slops your Amazon search results.

What does this mean? Well, if you've used the site at all recently to look for basic items, whether it be clothes, phone cases, or such, you'll notice that many reputable brands are now buried in a sea of items with capitalized letters. Items that appear to be coming from Temu or AliExpress.

Often, you'll be looking for something like a hairdryer, perhaps, and find an identical model listed under 3 different brand names, all trying their damnest to look like Dyson. Should I buy DRYSON, BLOWY, or the SKIBIDI RIZZ hairdryer? It's hard to decide.

Well, someone has had the gumption to create a Chrome Extension to solve this problem; it promises to filter "trademark-squat pseudo-brands (the SZHLUXes and HORUSDYs) out of your search results, so what's left are brands with a reputation to lose."

You can simply head to knockoff.shopping to get the extension and try it for yourself, but here are some more tips on getting it to work for you.

Using Knockoff

I've had issues with these "knockoff" brands myself recently while shopping for an ultrasonic cleaner for my son's retainer. We've now ordered two seemingly identical models under different brand names, and both have given up the ghost after a week.

Third time lucky, right? Well, I'm going to use the tool to help me narrow down my search this time. As you can see in the screenshot above, when I search for the item, my results are flooded with similar-looking items from different pseudo-brands that feel the need to shout their names at me. COSLUS! HYCHIKA! SEANCHEER! BUY US!

Following my installation of the tool, I can fiddle with the options before I go on my search to add brands that I don't want to be filtered, so ANKER and UGREEN, for example, are reputable electronic brands I trust; I don't want those filtered.

Now, upon running the search again, you can either have the tool 'dim' the dodgy results so you can still see them and make changes, or have it hide them completely. For now, I've set mine to dim results so I can start to teach it what I do and don't want to see.

Here I have selected to block this brand permanently. On the other hand, if I see brands I trust, I can tell the tool to add them to the Allow list for me.

Creator Josh Pigford has already mentioned on his X account some brands that may be inadvertently filtered out. I don't recognize many of these, but BIODANCE and LANIEGE are at least reputable Korean skincare brands, and I would add them to my filter.

The tool has now helped me select a third, and hopefully more reliable, cleaner for my son's retainer. It also helped me see more clearly that many of the 'dimmed' brands were around the same price, so I paid a little more for something potentially longer lasting.

I've only just started using the tool myself, afterall it's only been a day! But others are already reporting great success with it and I hope to have even better results as I tweak what I do and don't want to see. The extension is currently only available on Google Chrome, but it's coming to Safari and Firefox soon. No word on Microsoft Edge (yet).

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Have you ever wondered why minimum specs continue to creep upward? Part of the problem is that developers don't need to be as efficient as they did decades ago.

A recent video by Dave Plummer highlights the bloat of modern applications by following the journey of Plummer making a notepad that's just 2,686 bytes.

App development is complex, and there are genuinely good reasons that games and programs require such high specs in 2026. But generally speaking, programming doesn't have the constraints of yesteryear, so developers don't need to trim code.

A single app not being optimized is not that much of an issue, but when every program on your PC is bloated, problems pop up. The same productivity workflow today requires more RAM than it did in 2015.

For context, Windows 10 launched with a minimum requirement of just 1GB (for 32-bit) and 2GB of RAM (for 64-bit). Windows 11 requires at least 4GB just to boot the operating system, but most users want much more memory. It was controversial when Microsoft and other companies started offering new PCs with 8GB of RAM this year.

Plummer is best known for creating the Windows Task Manager. He also discusses programming and Windows history on his YouTube channel.

In a recent video, Plummer shared how he made a small notepad application that's smaller in size than a YouTube thumbnail.

Tiny Retro Pad has the core functionality of the original Notepad app built by Microsoft. Notably, it lacks the modern features seen in Notepad, such as Copilot. Considering Notepad's addition of Copilot was mocked by many, Tiny Retro Pad is an improvement in some ways.

Making a notepad app that's under 4,096 bytes is more about working within constraints than the specific size of the final app. In the early days of Windows, there were several limits placed on developers, such as hardware caps. Having to work within those constraints forced developers to be more efficient.

Plummer was able to keep Tiny Retro Pad small by utilizing what's already in Windows.

"A tiny native Windows program does not bring along its own entire civilization. It arrives with a lunchbox and a map of the city," said Plummer.

Later in the video, he added, "The program is small because it is not carrying what the platform already has. And that is a lesson that modern software could stand to remember. Not every app needs to bundle the universe. Not every utility needs to ship with a browser engine."

Nowadays, PCs, tablets, and phones have absurd specs. Even modest devices have several gigabytes of memory and tons of storage. Those specs make modern workflows possible, but they also leave room for lazy development.

"Somehow it seems modern software manages to go the other way. You just want a text box and somehow you've imported a runtime, a layout engine, a renderer, a dependency tree, a telemetry client, an auto updater, and a small portion of Chromium," said Plummer.

No one needs a notepad application that's less than 4,000 bytes, but if more app developers focused on efficient code, Windows 11 would feel smoother across the board.

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Microsoft needs to copy a new feature that makes it easier to multitask on Windows 11. But rather than Sherlocking a third-party app, Microsoft just needs to copy a concept proposed for its own app, PowerToys.

Every once in a while a feature gets added to PowerToys that makes me wonder "why isn't this part of Windows?" FancyZones immediately comes to mind, and Microsoft seems to agree since improved snapping in Windows 11 takes inspiration from that feature.

PowerToys may have another winner on its hands in AltWindowCycle, though I think a new name may be needed.

The utility allows you to switch between windows with a keyboard shortcut. It's similar to Alt + Tab, but it works within a single app. Clint Rutkas explained the tool in a GitHub pull request:

"Introduces a new utility: AltWindowCycle to quickly switch between windows from the same process using Alt + `. It works like Alt + Tab, but scoped to the app you’re already in. Perfect for juggling multiple browser windows, terminals, or editor instances."

AltWindowCycle is still in its early stages. If it is finished and made a part of PowerToys, I hope it also makes its way to Windows 11.

If it does become part of Windows 11, AltWindowCycle would help Microsoft's operating system catch up to macOS and some Linux distros, which use either Alt + \` or Cmd + ` to cycle through windows of the same app, albeit a bit differently.

Many PowerToys features are niche and would be considered bloat by non-power users if included with Windows 11. But a small shortcut that makes multitasking easier would be a natural addition to Windows 11, especially since AltWindowCycle works similarly to the well-known Alt + Tab shortcut.

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I love widgets. Microsoft seems much cooler on the concept. Sure, Windows 11 has a Widgets Panel, but it's barely useful due to its lack of quality widgets. That's why I was so excited to see WidBar highlighted on Reddit.

WidBar is a new app that allows you to add widgets to the empty spaces of the Windows 11 taskbar. It's still in beta, but it's off to a promising start.

The developer of WidBar, Andrea Del Bello, shared the app and detailed its progress.

At the moment, WidBar only has a pair of widgets: "Now Playing" and "System Metrics." They're basic but they do a good job showcasing the app.

Within WidBar, you can drag and drop widgets into a preview of your taskbar. Different widgets can be placed on various monitors.

Any developer can make widgets for WidBar. Del Bello explained how that works on Reddit:

"Each widget is just a small packaged app that you publish to the Microsoft Store like any other app, and WidBar picks it up on its own: there's no separate plugin store, no manual install into WidBar, and no approval from me. The moment your widget is installed from the Store, WidBar recognizes it automatically, it appears in the catalog, and the user can drop it onto the taskbar."

Del Bello also provided a template for making WidBar widgets on GitHub.

Putting Microsoft to shame

WidBar has two supported widgets right now and is still in beta, but it already surpasses Windows 11's Widgets Panel in an important way.

Incredibly, the Widgets Panel lacks a Now Playing widget from Microsoft. Windows 11 has those controls, but they appear in the Action Center. That shows how much Microsoft thinks about the Widgets Panel.

There is a widget made by Stefan vd called "S Media Controls" that seems to fill the gap, but I've only used it briefly in testing.

Even if you give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and argue having audio controls in the Action Center and the Widgets Panel, it won't take much to catch up.

With just two supported widgets, WidBar is well on its way to beating the Widgets Panel. There are a grand total of 56 widgets in the Microsoft Store for the Widgets Panel. And that count includes "My Tic-Tac-Toe" and several entries that appear to be money grabs that offer little functionality.

Add a clock, a calendar, a recent files shortcut and WidBar is almost 10% of the way to the entire Widgets Panel ecosystem.

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PowerToys just received a small but important update that brings the app to version 0.100.1. The update focuses on fixes to version 0.100.0 of the app, which included a bunch of new features.

Normally I wouldn't cover a small update to an app, but in this case the bugs prevented core features of PowerToys from working. Luckily, the bugs have been squashed.

One issue caused keys that had been remapped to non-modifier keys to be delivered as system-key events. An example of that is mapping Alt to Backspace could result in deleting whole words instead of individual characters.

Another bug prevented monitors from waking from standby after selecting On through Power Display.

The developers of PowerToys log all the changes to the app on GitHub.

PowerToys v0.100.1

Highlights

• This patch release fixes several important stability and behavior issues identified in v0.100.0 based on incoming reports. Check out the v0.100.0 notes for the full list of changes.

Color Picker

• Fixed a bug where the main Color Picker window could appear inside the zoomed-in picker view in #48762 by @daverayment

Command Palette

• Fixed Run history initialization in AOT builds in #48463
• Fixed a bug where the Performance Monitor dock item could show ??? after restart in #48682 by @giruuuuj
• Fixed the Hibernate command using the Sleep icon in #48689 by @MrBisquit
• Limited the "pin to dock" dialog to displays where the dock is enabled in #48723

Keyboard Manager

• Fixed modifier keys remapped to non-modifier keys being delivered as system-key events, which caused unexpected behavior in apps such as Alt-to-Backspace deleting whole words in #47192 by @oMatheusmol

Power Display

• Fixed a bug where selecting On in the monitor power-state control did not wake a monitor from standby in #48628
• Fixed built-in display detection and brightness control on dual-GPU laptops where the internal panel is driven by the discrete GPU in #48637

PowerToys Run

• Fixed VS Code Workspaces discovery after VS Code moved recently opened workspace data to shared storage in #47505

Quick Access

• Fixed Quick Access flyout crashes caused by unhandled XAML exceptions during launch or page navigation in #48457

Shortcut Guide

• Fixed a crash when navigating between Shortcut Guide sidebar sections in #48481
• Fixed number-key rendering in shortcut manifests and added a Postman shortcut manifest in #48461 by @brycewc
• Updated bundled shortcut manifests to use the literal number-key token so number keys render correctly across apps in #48757 by @brycewc

ZoomIt

• Fixed a race condition in audio initialization for ZoomIt video recording in #48685 by @MarioHewardt

Power Display is one of my favorite utilities in PowerToys. It allows you to manage the brightness and other settings of your external monitor through a series of flyouts. It saves me the hassle of reaching around the bottom or back of my display to adjust settings with awkward buttons.

The recently fixed bug took away core functionality of Power Display, so I'm happy to see it addressed.

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