Microsoft has officially unveiled its new Run dialog box for Windows 11, which the company says has been rebuilt from the ground up using Windows 11's modern UI framework known as WinUI 3. It's the first time the Run box has been significantly updated in decades, with the previous version essentially debuting with Windows 95.
The new box features a clean new UI that's more consistent with the rest of Windows 11's design language, but that's not the only improvement. It's also faster, which is no small feat for WinUI interfaces, meaning it now appears quicker than before, every time you initiate the Run box.
Yes, the new Run also includes a new feature. It now supports ~\ for quick home directory access. It also now shows icons for the programs you run from the Run box, providing an overall polished experience. The only "downgrade" that the new Run brings is the removal of the browse button.
While a downgrade on paper, this isn't something 99% of users are going to care about, as Microsoft has the data, and it found that only 0.0038% of users out of a sample of 35 million Run users have clicked that button. So while a few people will miss it, most definitely won't.
"When we set out on creating the new experience, we knew the existing dialog was fast. We also knew we needed to be sure we deeply understood how you all used it," says Clint Rutkas, Principle Product Manager at Microsoft. "To help evolve, we added a measure briefly to the dialog to see what was being used and to measure time-to-show. "
"The most important thing to our team is getting feedback and constantly iterating and improving. This dialog may seem small, but for some folks it is a mission critical part of your workflow. We want to be sure it works for everyone." As the box is so critical to so many people, Microsoft is even making the new UI optional, with the legacy interface remaining as the default choice for the foreseeable future, even though the new one is better.
If you want to try out the new Run box, you can enable in the Windows Settings app by going to Settings > System > Advanced and toggling on the new Run dialog box option. If you don't like it, feel free to toggle it back off and go about your day.
The new Run box is a small addition, but it's an example of Microsoft doing things right on Windows 11. It's not just updated the interface for the sake of change, it's modernizing the experience so that it falls in line with the rest of Windows 11, while also making it both faster and more capable.
In the past, Microsoft has attempted a hybrid approach when it comes to modernizing legacy areas of the system. File Explorer is the primary example of this, where much of it is still using old code, but some of it has been updated with modern UI elements. This has caused File Explorer to become incredibly bloated and slow, to the point where Microsoft is now attempting to fix it.
I think the company has realized that this hybrid approach doesn't work. It needs to either go all in on modernizing these legacy areas of the system, or leave them as legacy and build new things to replace them, with the option to restore the legacy experience if that's something users prefer. The new Run box perfectly encapsulates this.
Of course, the new Run box is shipping under Microsoft's ongoing Windows K2 effort, which is a project that is seeing the company refocus its efforts on making Windows a strong and reliable OS platform for power users, gamers, and developers. The company is hellbent on making the OS faster, lighter, and more performant on differing levels of hardware, and is striving to deliver better user experiences across the OS going forward.
The new Run box is what happens when Microsoft puts people in charge who care about Windows and the people that use it, and I hope to see this happening much more in the future.
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