With Windows as a Service, Microsoft has delivered a steady stream of monthly updates to Windows 10, along with a more substantial upgrade in November. The monthly updates and periodic upgrades bring with them a wide collection of security fixes, stability improvements, and new features.

Until now, however, it has been hard to know exactly what each update and upgrade contains. While security fixes were enumerated—as they have been for Patch Tuesday for many years—information about the non-security portion of the updates was scant. Microsoft's public release notes for each update package were virtually non-existent—and this in spite of the company producing internal documentation to tell its OEM partners what was changing. After pushback from IT departments and end users alike, the company announced in October that it was going to change its policy and provide some documentation of what these monthly updates actually contain.

The first set of these release notes has now been published. Windows 10 version 1511 is being updated to build 10586.104, and because of the new release notes, we know that this update includes some quality-of-life fixes and the obligatory security updates but no new features. The most notable non-security update is a fix to the Edge browser that prevents it from caching visited URLs when using InPrivate mode.

While the new release notes are still perhaps a bit vaguer than one would like—for example, the update fixes unspecified "issues" with installing patches and the operating system with no indication of what those issues might be—this change is still a useful improvement on what came before.