How to Enable New Search Box on the Left Side of the Taskbar in Windows 11 25217

In this article, we will talk about How to Enable New Search Box on the Left Side of the Taskbar in Windows 11 25217.

In the latest Dev Channel Build 25217, Microsoft is testing yet another Search Box variant as a hidden feature. In this article, I will show you how to enable it.

Download ViveTool from Github

You will need to download ViveTool, which is a small app that will help us enable hidden features from Windows.

After you download ViveTool, you will need to extract the contents of the archive into the System32 location so that we can have full administrative privileges to the operating system.

Right-click on the archive and then click on Extract all. Select the System32 location and then click on Extract. You will also need to provide some administrative privileges.

After you’ve done that, you will need to open CMD as administrator and then copy and paste the following command:

vivetool /enable /id:40887771

After this, you will need to restart the computer, for the changes to take effect.

This is how the new search will look after the restart, but what’s interesting, is that you will have different options for the Search Box if you right-click on the taskbar and click on Taskbar Settings.

You will be able to hide the Search Box, Show only the search icon, and also show the whole search box.

If you open CMD as Administrator again and run this command, you will also be able to enable a different visual for the Search Box on the left side:

vivetool /enable /id:39263329 /variant:3 

Make sure to restart the computer again, for the changes to take effect.

This is how the Search Box will look after the restart, also with the possibility of changing the settings from Taskbar Settings.

Note that this new hidden feature can be very buggy, so try it out at your own risk on a virtual machine or a testing machine.

If you want to disable this new Search Box, just run these 2 commands in CMD:

vivetool /disable /id:39263329 /variant:3 
vivetool /disable /id:40887771

For a more in-depth tutorial, you can watch the video below from the youtube channel.