Salesforce release notes, decoded: Winter '26

Six hundred pages of release notes, reduced to the eleven changes that will actually touch your org — and the two that might break it.

Read the retirements first

The gold is at the back: features entering retirement. Workflow rules and process builder migrations stop being optional the release they go read-only — count backwards from that date, not forwards from today.

The quiet permission changes

Every release tightens a default somewhere. This one touches guest user access and API versions below 40 — run the release-update checklist in a sandbox on preview weekend, not in production on go-live morning.

What I am actually excited about

Flow gets reactive screens everywhere, and the new Apex Cursors go GA — pagination over big queries without the offset dance. Both land in the courses here over the next month.