Overview
- The new context menu began reaching users this Thursday through the optional preview update KB5127936 but Microsoft is enabling the feature gradually rather than switching it on for everyone at once.
- Once enabled a new 'Menu anpassen' option appears and leads to Settings > Personalization > Context Menu where users can toggle file actions, move app extensions into an 'App‑Extensions' submenu, and change how primary actions appear.
- Microsoft reduced the default main-level entries from roughly 20 to eight to make the menu open faster and said third‑party shell extensions were a key cause of prior slowness.
- Users who want the menu immediately can install KB5127936 and force-enable the change with the third‑party ViVeTool (for example: vivetool /enable /id:60813048); the same steps can be reversed by running the corresponding 'disable' command.
- Microsoft plans to include the redesigned menu broadly with November security updates, and restoring many hidden items will return functionality at the cost of the potential sluggishness the redesign aims to avoid.