Microsoft is reportedly planning to give Windows 10 a UI facelift late next year. According to a new report on Windows Central, the project is codenamed ‘Sun Valley’ and it involves modernizing several Windows 10 UI elements such as the Start Menu, Action Center, and File Explorer.
Sun Valley will apparently have user experiences closer to what Windows 10X will offer. The Redmond giant will also allegedly update the taskbar of Windows 10 through this effort. As far as the overall UI is concerned, Microsoft will adopt rounded corners, including in app windows.
From the report, it is clear that Microsoft is not ready to drop the outdated/legacy components of Windows 10 yet, which is just disappointing. Instead, the company will offer dark support to legacy UI areas in an effort to make the overall experience more consistent. You could also expect a wider adoption of WinUI in the interface.
Separately, Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet reports that Microsoft is internally calling project Sun Valley as ‘Windows 10++’ too. In addition, the report suggests that all these changes are expected to show up on Windows 10X for single-screen devices by Spring 2022 as well.
As mentioned earlier, Sun Valley is expected to ship next year. However, it won’t happen in the first half of 2021. It is part of Microsoft’s Cobalt development schedule, which refers to the timeframe from January to June 2021. If everything goes well, you could expect the update in October next year. There are also rumors that Microsoft may skip Windows 10 feature update in the first half of the year to prioritize Windows 10X development.
With all that said, it is worth mentioning that Microsoft doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to UI overhauls and all the aforesaid changes are not even officially promised just yet. Hence, there is a possibility that Microsoft could either stop or delay the changes and we would recommend taking this with a grain of salt.
