Windows 11 September 2026 Update: Every Important New Feature

You Can Finally Move the Taskbar Again

Yes — Windows 11 can now put the taskbar on the top, left, or right edge of the screen, not just the bottom. Go to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Taskbar behaviors > Taskbar position and pick from four previews: Bottom, Top, Left, or Right.

Taskbar position was a staple of Windows going back to Windows 95 — Windows 11 removed it at launch and brought it back after almost five years of complaints.

This was one of the most criticized decisions Windows 11 made when it launched in 2021, and Microsoft is walking it back almost five years later. According to Microsoft's own release notes and independent testing from outlets like Windows Latest, tooltips, flyouts, and animations correctly follow the taskbar to its new position, and most existing customizations — like keeping icons uncombined — keep working no matter where you put it.

There's one limitation worth knowing before you switch: the search box and the smaller taskbar option (below) are currently only supported when the taskbar sits at the top or bottom. Move it to the left or right edge and the search box collapses to an icon.

A Genuinely Smaller Taskbar Option

Windows 11 already had a "smaller taskbar buttons" toggle, but it only shrank the icons — the bar itself stayed the same height. That's fixed now. Head to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Taskbar behaviors > Taskbar size and set it to Small, and both the icons and the bar's overall height shrink together, which matters most on smaller laptop screens where every pixel of vertical space counts.

Start Menu Sizing and Section Controls

The Start menu gets its own dedicated size selector at Settings > Personalization > Start > Start menu size, with three options: Small, Automatic, and Large. Alongside that, Microsoft renamed the "Recommended" section to "Recent" — a small wording change, but one that better describes what the section actually shows — and added independent toggles so you can show or hide the Pinned, Recent, and All sections separately instead of accepting Microsoft's default mix.

There's also a new privacy-flavored option: you can hide your name and profile picture from the Start menu entirely, useful if you screen-share often or just don't want a personal photo visible on a shared or presentation PC.

Windows Search Without Bing and Store Results

You can now strip web and Microsoft Store suggestions out of Windows Search entirely, leaving only your own files and apps. Go to Settings > Privacy & security > Search and turn off the Web searches and Microsoft Store toggles.

This has been one of the most requested changes to Windows 11 for years — search that's supposed to help you find a local file instead returning a page of Bing results and app-store suggestions. Multiple outlets testing the update, including Windows Latest, reported that Search also feels noticeably faster once those extra result sources are switched off, since it's no longer waiting on a network round-trip before it can show you anything.

The Security Side: 974 Fixes, Two Zero-Days

It's easy to focus on the visible UI changes and miss that KB5124008 is also one of the largest security releases Microsoft has shipped. The company addressed 974 vulnerabilities across its products this cycle, 723 of them in Windows itself, including two that were already being actively exploited before the patch landed — most notably CVE-2026-85880, a flaw in Windows's Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) component that could let an attacker gain elevated privileges on an affected machine.

Microsoft is also beginning a gradual rollout of Administrator Protection, a feature that keeps your everyday account running with standard privileges and only elevates to admin rights for the specific action that needs them, rather than granting broad admin access for an entire session.

Which Windows 11 Version Are You On?

Not every Windows 11 PC gets the same package this month, and that trips people up. Here's the breakdown:

If you're still on 23H2, KB5122880 keeps you patched against the same vulnerabilities, but it doesn't include the taskbar, Start menu, or Search changes covered above — those are exclusive to 24H2 and 25H2. Worth noting too: 23H2 Enterprise and Education editions reach end of updates on November 10, 2026, and 24H2 Home and Pro editions reach end of updates on October 13, 2026, so if you're on either of those tracks, this is a good moment to plan your upgrade path.

Why Some Features Roll Out Later Than Others

If you've installed KB5124008 and some of these features aren't showing up, that's expected, not a sign anything went wrong. Microsoft controls the rollout of individual features through a mechanism called Controlled Feature Rollout (CFR) — the update installs the code for every feature at once, but Microsoft flips each one on for different users gradually, partly to catch problems in a smaller group before pushing a change to everyone.

Turning on Settings > Windows Update > "Get the latest updates as soon as they're available" can help features reach your PC sooner. If you don't want to wait at all, tools like ViVeTool can force-enable hidden features, though that's a more advanced, unsupported route — see our companion guide for exactly which settings to check first before reaching for a tool like that.

Frequently Asked Questions