14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just released Windows 10 Redstone preview build 14251 for fast ring members of the Windows Insider program, thus making a huge jump in version number for the PC iteration of the OS.
Naturally, users expected significant feature improvements in this build since Microsoft updated Windows 10 Redstone preview builds from 11102 to 14251, but Gabe Aul, head of the Windows Insider program, says that the development team continues work on refining performance and fixing bugs.
So no, there are no significant changes in this build, but Aul says that many of the bugs found in the previous versions are now fixed.
Why the version jump
He also explains the big change in version number:
“Historically, the codebase for mobile had a different OS version than the codebase for PC because they were developed by different teams on different schedules. With Windows 10, we became one Windows team and brought these two codebases together. We started by changing the version string displayed in the UI to be consistent, which is why you saw similarly labeled builds over the past year for both Mobile and PC, but the underlying binary version numbers were still different,” Aul said.
“As part of our work getting the common codebase ready for the next release, we decided to complete that work and sync the build numbers between mobile and PC. Because the mobile codebase used higher build numbers than PC, we needed to jump ahead a bunch of build numbers to ensure updates to future builds will continue to work. So that’s why build numbers went from 11105, 11106, and 11107 to 14251.”
At this point, this version is only available for the fast ring, but depending on how bug fixing advances in the coming days, Microsoft could push it for the slow channel as well.
Aul has once again announced that Microsoft switched to a faster release cadence and reminded that those who don’t want to spend too much time diagnosing bugs should make the jump to the slow ring.