It's atrocious. No slider, clicking on it "blips" the speakers so you can hear how loud it is. You have to hover pointer on top of it which enlarges the green circle by about 10% to show "Hey, you're hovering me, in case you missed it!" and then scroll so the the tiny tiny dot gets slightly more enlarged (which clearly indicates new volume, duh). Then it shrinks to a smaller size back when stopping the hover.
Oh, the arrow to the right? Does that open the customary volume slider? No that's the sound device picker. Speaker to the left is the mute. To make matters worse it's in the same "group" as the network symbol is (although there's no network settings when clicking), and sometimes clicking the thing doesn't work at all, depends on how much explorer.exe decides to hang at the moment.
But surely I just got some broken alpha/beta version.
Looks like the volume slider has no minimum width and is compressed down to a single blip. When there are other widgets in the container, it expands to a usable width. Reasonable bug for beta software.
I wonder if it has something to do with your language. I know they've had other random UI issues if your language wasn't set to english. Here's my volume setting for reference:
https://i.imgur.com/PwW0SwI.png
It's still frustrating though. I can't just click the volume icon and use the mouse scroller to change the volume. It takes two clicks now.
The wheel does work when just hovering over many sliders, at least on Mac and in Firefox. However, whether that works in any particular app or a site is a gamble.
In some apps and sites with a specific purpose the wheel is often mapped more generally: e.g. to volume control in video players regardless of the position, unless it's over the time slider.
Hmm, where do you need two clicks to change the volume by scrolling? I can just click on the volume icon (or any of the three icons there, since they're all a big button), mouse over the volume slider, and scroll to change it. I think this is essentially the same flow as before.
That's so hilariously misguided, it's like some student's experimental pet project. It gives zero visual hint as to how to use it (i.e. ‘affordances’). From the looks, I'd guess that it's a horizontal slider with the range of like fifty pixels. If this was any kind of an established control, you'd surely just use the speaker icon itself as the ‘handler’ to grab—the fact that they needed the separate green dot says enough about whether it was a good idea. How it passed any kind of review at MS is a baffling mystery.
It's actually mind-boggling just how bad UI/UX in general has become. Like, there are things which are bad because it's hard to get right, but this trend to me sinks even lower than that, it's actually spectacularly bad.
Everywhere I look: Windows, Android, websites, mobile apps... it's all so terrible. Confusing interfaces (indecipherable icons with no text), ridiculously small or ridiculously large text (either I can't read it without zooming or so large that it fits 3 lines in a 15" screen), endless whitespace, no visual feedback about how to interact with the interface, such as what is clickable or not, etc.
I chalk this up to designers not giving a rat's ass about actually designing their interfaces carefully and thoughtfully, and simply optimising for one things: looking good on screenshots. If you think about it it explains everything about this.
So you have signed up for insider builds? Then claiming that they have "randomly thrown" it at you is just odd. You explicitly told them you wanted early builds.
Not OP but I'm in the same boat. I signed up for insider (dev) builds to get X support in WSL2, then set it to switch me back to insider (beta) builds on the next opportunity. But they didn't do another beta or any other insider built really before rolling out Win11 to dev so that's what I got on the next update. There also wasn't any notice this would happen despite my machine apparently not meeting the requirements for Windows 11.
I'm not complaining but it was definitely unexpected for me despite being in the insiders program. Especially given that Windows 11 is being promoted as the "next version of Windows", not just another Windows 10 release.
FWIW my volume slider is still a slider. I have no idea what's going on in that screenshot but either they're A/B testing, this is a weird language-specific UI variant or there's a bug.
"External headphones" should be a headphones icon, not a computer icon, is my complaint, to be explicit. It used to be correct in a previous version of macOS but regressed at some point.
I've specifically went and downloaded the latest ISO of Windows 11 preview to see this monstrosity, but no, it seems like a completely normal slider to me, just like in Windows 10.
It's atrocious. No slider, clicking on it "blips" the speakers so you can hear how loud it is. You have to hover pointer on top of it which enlarges the green circle by about 10% to show "Hey, you're hovering me, in case you missed it!" and then scroll so the the tiny tiny dot gets slightly more enlarged (which clearly indicates new volume, duh). Then it shrinks to a smaller size back when stopping the hover.
Oh, the arrow to the right? Does that open the customary volume slider? No that's the sound device picker. Speaker to the left is the mute. To make matters worse it's in the same "group" as the network symbol is (although there's no network settings when clicking), and sometimes clicking the thing doesn't work at all, depends on how much explorer.exe decides to hang at the moment.
But surely I just got some broken alpha/beta version.