Leak: You may soon be getting Windows 11 22H2 features on 21H2 as well

Back in July, Microsoft released Windows 11 Dev channel build 25158 for Insiders. The build added to the visual appeal of Windows 11 with new taskbar Search bar styles, among other features and improvements. However, it looks like the new feature may not be limited to just Windows 11 22H2 now as users have begun spotting it on the original Windows 11 21H2 release as well.

The change was noticed by Twitter use Mauro earlier today when a new Search bar style showed up on their 21H2 build.

Later on, the leaksters picked up on it and one of them, who goes by the alias PhantomOcean3 on Twitter, discovered that Microsoft had indeed brought in such changes to Windows 11 21H2 under the hood. However, this is hidden which means they are still being tested.

The PhantomOcean3 posted three different taskbar Search styles in 21H2 build 22000.1042 (KB5017383). You can view them in the screenshots attached below alongside the winver dialog box which shows the build number. There are three variants of it:

How to enable the new Taskbar search in Windows 11 build 22000.1042

1. Download ViVeTool from its repository on Github and extract the files whenever you like. For example, in the root of drive C.
2. Right-click the Start menu button and select Terminal (Admin).
3. Switch Terminal to the Command Prompt profile using the arrow-down button on the tab strip.
4. Navigate to the folder containing Vive files using the CD command. Here is an example: CD C:\Vive.
5. Execute the following command:
   • vivetool /enable /id:39263329 /variant:X (1, 3 or 5)
6. Restart your computer (optional).

Via: PhantomOcean3 (Twitter)