Windows 10 Preview Build 17083 Brings Settings Changes, Windows Timeline

Beyond privacy-related updates, the latest preview build for Windows 10, 17083, brings updates to font settings, Windows Timeline, and Ease of Access settings.

Windows Timeline

If you’re not already using Windows 10 preview builds, you won’t have Timeline, as the feature never made it to the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. This feature attempts determine your activities and groups together open apps and browser tabs according to time of day that you used them. The functional principle behind it is that users work on different tasks at different times. Timeline more or less lets you save multiple versions of your desktop to be resumed later. It’s accessed from the Task View on the Taskbar.


Timeline was introduced in an earlier preview build, but it’s getting some usability tweaks in 17083. Whereas previously activities had to be deleted one by one, you can now clear them by hour or day. Also, a new setting “Let Windows sync my activities from this PC to the cloud” prevents automatic syncing of activities across devices.

Updates To Fonts Settings

Microsoft is making fonts a big deal in 17083. Currently, settings for fonts are handled in the old Control Panel at (Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Fonts). This is soon going to migrate into Windows Settings and be part of the Personalization settings. The makeover is going to bring color to the font previews and show them in the context of your current language settings.

More detail is coming to font previews. Beyond scaling the font size, the preview window will also present fonts in all bold and italic styles. This might not sound very useful for regular fonts, but it’ll be a boon for OpenType variable fonts, which will have all their settings presented here.

Lastly, acquiring new fonts is going to become easier because they’ll now be available in the Windows Store. A link in the new font settings will take you there.

Updates To Ease Of Access Settings

Ease of Access is another settings page that will be improved. Two quality of life changes are happening. First, users can now toggle off automatic hiding of scroll bars in UWP apps. Second, the hotkey for enabling screen filters (Windows key + Ctrl + C) like invert and grayscale can now be disabled. Other fixes include bug fixes to Narrator and minor changes to the color filters.

There are many more changes that we haven’t detailed. The full change log is available here.