// Release notes
ViStart 8.1.0.5311 — Windows 11 support
Posted 27 March 2023
Quick release note: ViStart now runs on Windows 11.
A few months ago I put a survey on the homepage just to see what people actually wanted from the apps. The answers were almost unanimous: keep it working on newer Windows, fix the bugs. So this release is the response.
The interesting work was making it tolerate the new shell. Microsoft moved a few things around in Win11 that ViStart was poking at directly — pinned items, the recent-files list, the way Explorer opens folder contents — so a chunk of this release is just teaching ViStart to behave when Windows hands back something it didn't expect.
What changed in 8.1.0.5311
- Windows 11 support. Tested on the current build at time of writing; should keep working through future updates, barring Microsoft doing something unhinged.
- Faster start-up. Less work at launch; more noticeable on slower disks.
- Recent-items folders pop out instead of opening Explorer. Hover-to-expand, the way Win7 originally did it. The Explorer-launching behaviour was a long-standing regression I'd been meaning to fix.
- Better stability. Several crash paths fixed.