Windows 10's Taskbar Is Getting a Big Update With New Weather and News Widget (theverge.com) 117
Microsoft is making a big change to its Windows 10 taskbar soon, with the addition of a news and weather widget. The Verge reports: The new feature is available to testers today, and it will allow Windows 10 users to access a feed of news, stocks, and weather information straight from the taskbar. You'll be able to quickly glance at the weather without having to open the Start menu, install a third-party app, or check online. The taskbar feature will pop out into a mini feed of content that can be personalized with the latest sports news, headlines, and weather information. Microsoft is using its Microsoft News network to surface news and content from more than 4,500 sources. The company has been curating this through artificial intelligence in recent months, and this particular feature will also learn what news is relevant to you when you dismiss or like stories in the feed.
This new taskbar feature will also require Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge to be installed on a PC. That means any link you click within the feature will force you into Edge to read it, and Microsoft is presenting content in the reading view by default. You can of course disable this new taskbar feature, and Microsoft says it will be an ad-free experience.
This new taskbar feature will also require Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge to be installed on a PC. That means any link you click within the feature will force you into Edge to read it, and Microsoft is presenting content in the reading view by default. You can of course disable this new taskbar feature, and Microsoft says it will be an ad-free experience.
That's the next Windows 10 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's the next Windows 10 (Score:4, Insightful)
"Allow".... they keep using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means... perhaps if this was an option you were "allowed" to turn on, instead of something you at best will need to turn off and at worst won't "allow" you to turn off, like Microsoft's exciting "updatee" process.
Re:That's the next Windows 10 (Score:5, Funny)
They are very exciting. My blood starts pumping every time there's an update. When the laptop starts rebooting, it's a total cliffhanger. Will my OS still be there? Will my data still be there?
On the next episode of Dragon Ball Z...
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Some people say that parts are too predictable, for example Edge appears in every episode, but still Microsoft does a great job surprising us. Will it show up, full screen, right at the beginning, or will it sneak up from the task bar?
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And... "big upgrade" is that a weather widget gets added? What is this, the world's slowest news day? Nothing happening in Congress at all, for example?
It's the same as the other story about WiFi's Biggest Upgrade in Decades [slashdot.org], which means its biggest upgrade ever since it's only been around for the time period mentioned. And that upgrade is... um, go-faster stripes? That's really the biggest upgrade ever for WiFi?
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It is an option. Obviously you didn't fully read the summary.
"You can of course disable this new taskbar feature".
It doesn't matter if the feature is on by default or off by default if you can disable the feature then it is optional.
Re:That's the next Windows 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's optional. That's literally what I called the best case in my comment. What does that have to do with "allow"? They're going to add it and allow you to turn it off, not allow you to use it. That's what the difference in the default being on means.
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Actually no. Being able to "hide" it is not the same as being able to "disable" it, both of which are entirely different from "uninstalling and removing all traces".
It is probably, at least initially, very easy to "hide"; likely requires deep registry surgery or GPO's to "disable"; and, likely cannot be "uninstalled".
Within thirty days of this being rolled out you will no longer be able to "hide" it because it will be used as a backchannel for spying and advertising by Microsoft -- otherwise there is no po
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It is no doubt a means to encourage users to give them location data because of course news and weather don't work so well if you don't let MS know exactly where you are at all times of day and night.
Re:That's the next Windows 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
The logic they use is mind boggling.
They noticed that many phones show the weather on a widget. Seems to be popular... But they make a desktop OS, not a phone, so what relevance does that have? And if people already have it on their phone why would they also want it on their computer?
So they do it anyway, but of course it's not enough just to do it, or pop up a single notification saying "hey we added this new feature, click here to enable it". Oh no, it has to be turned on by default or people might not use it, and then it would be a massive failure like all the other very similar half baked ideas they have had over the years.
Of course it never occurs to them that ramming it in people's faces is what primes them to automatically disable anything new without even trying it, and maybe install an app to force remove it as well, and turn off all the telemetry while it's at it.
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This is the first candidate for the most wise and insightful comment of 2021. I want to laugh, but mostly I want to cry. The planned obsolescence of Windows 7 and the sabotage Microsoft forces upon hardware (e.g. Intel cpus & chipsets, motherboard manufacturers) and software companies (e.g. VMware) have dear consequences for the 15-25% of Windows users choosing to stay with Win7 until the end of the world.
To paraphrase your post: Of course it never occurs to them that ramming Windows 10 in people's face
How to remove them (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How to remove them (Score:5, Funny)
Great, now, point me to the instructions to remove them!
Here you go [linuxmint.com]
Re: How to remove them (Score:2)
Re:How to remove them (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. My computer is not a phone. I don't need an orchestrated effort to make it look/act/behave like one.
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Exactly. My computer is not a phone. I don't need an orchestrated effort to make it look/act/behave like one.
That's way too much credit. I'd expect an "Orchestrated Effort" to involve some amount of success, if even by accident.
Here's a guide. (Score:1)
1) Download an Ubuntu installation image.
2) Write the image to a USB drive.
3) Boot from USB drive.
4) Install Ubuntu.
OS compartmentation works very well. (Score:2)
You can use another OS for communication and confine Windows to necessary activities. I've done that for many years and it's quite easy.
My Windows installs only run necessary applications. My Linux boxes get Windows VMs and my Windows boxes get Linux VMs (VMs are so easy to copy it's very low effort. I'm quite lazy.) Clean Windows .isos abound and it works fine without activation.
There are various Windows OS enterprise and server options, LTSC etc and I suggest examining them for the educational value and
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Yup, easy of copying VMs is what made me switch to them too.
Then i started installing them in VHDs.
Now they are easy to copy / backup / restore AND i boot them natively from BCD/EasyBCD as well as boot same file in hypervisor when needed in the other OS
No longer even keep multiple partitions. My entire SSD is the data partition with a VHD folder that keeps these 3-4 VHD files (granted they take same space 40GB-120GB for various linux/windows flavours. But easy to copy)
Just have a 1-2 TB external HDD for bac
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That may be true, but I recommend you confine Windows to unnecessary activities, on grounds of security and reliability.
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This is a serious concern...
Great, now, point me to the instructions to remove them!
This is a serious point. Because, from the article...
The company has been curating this through artificial intelligence in recent months...
We are already concerned with mono-culture "curated" news and Microsoft's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to forcefully corner the market on what news people see isn't going to work any better now than when MSN tried to do it for your "home page". Remember Lycos and Yahoo... those search engines that moved to try and give you curated news 25 yeas ago and make their home pages your one-stop shopping, if you just only listen to
Oh bring out the flags. (Score:2)
Well fuck me, this is something to celebrate, jeez, a weather & news app.
Say it ain't so Joe? /. is no more I fear
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The Verge? Again? (Score:4, Funny)
Not a feature (Score:5, Insightful)
Just another attempt to monetize the user base. Why the hell would I go to MS for my news and weather when I have my choice of so many much better sources? And why would I care if it's on my taskbar?
Re:Not a feature (Score:5, Informative)
Same here. I already have a curated set of news sources. I don't need to train another algorithm to filter out BS and sensationalism. I also get my weather info from NOAA in chart format so I can see everything all at once without pesky animations and graphics. (Ex. https://forecast.weather.gov/M... [weather.gov])
I'll be looking to turn it off the second I notice its existence just like animated tiles.
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Animation can actually be extremely helpful in visualizing and understanding weather patterns, but not when they're done like crap, which every single one of them was, until Ventusky. [ventusky.com]
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Why the hell would I go to MS for my news and weather when I have my choice of so many much better sources?
Define better sources. MS has had a partnership with a respected major news agency for 25 years now. Feel free to get your news from elsewhere, but don't pretend you're getting "news from MS" rather than "news from the most watched cable news channel in the USA" which is where MS stories actually come from.
Re:Not a feature (Score:5, Funny)
Why the hell would I go to MS for my news and weather when I have my choice of so many much better sources?
Define better sources.
Opening the front door and looking out.
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Opening the front door and looking out.
I understand Americans pride themselves on thinking the rest of the world doesn't exist, but I didn't realise you prefer to think the rest of your own street doesn't exist either.
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Opening the front door and looking out.
I understand Americans pride themselves on thinking the rest of the world doesn't exist, but I didn't realise you prefer to think the rest of your own street doesn't exist either.
...are you suggesting that one's next-door neighbors are likely to have different weather? Or that looking outside for the weather prevents one's neighbors from doing the same?
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I'm suggesting the times that I look up the weather I'm neither interested in what the weather is right now nor what it's like in my street. That is literally the most pointless information a weather service has.
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I have a Windows phone. Still. It sits by my bed, where it functions mostly as an alarm clock and weather app. The built-in weather app is far superior IMO to the five or so weather apps I've tried on my iPhone, including the built-in one; it's also better than the weather apps on my wife's Android. For one thing, it tells me what the hour-by-hour weather will be tomorrow, which the other phone weather apps do not. And that allows me to plan runs or other outdoor activities for the next day. (Do I nee
What have you smoked? (Score:2)
Is adding two spying widgets (which require access to your ubication) "a big update"?
I mean, I can add thousands right now (including the "big update" ones from third parties)...
What's REALLY new? Nothing.
So... nothing to see, move along.
So...all the bugs must be fixed then? (Score:5, Informative)
I have to assume that by adding shit that no one really cares about, all the various UI and glitches in 10 are fixed? There's a consistent interface to the settings menu ( or control panel )? That all the settings/control panel widgets work as designed?
If not, what the fuck are we adding features for?
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If you don't add new features, you're not innovating. If you add new features, you're ignoring existing problems. I'm not defending Microsoft specifically, it's just a problem that exists
I think there's subtext to this issue.
My go-to example is Serato DJ, a piece of software I use for, well, DJing.
The ability to add folders to watch and automatically add new songs which are found within them is a feature that has been requested for the better part of two decades now. Seriously, the feature requests on their forums go back to 2004. Moreover, I had this functionality back in the Windows 98 era, on Mixmeister 3, so "for each *.mp3 in $SOME_FOLDER do import to $SOME_CRATE" isn't the sort of pro
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I feel that, sometimes, fixing the UI problems would be a new feature in Windows.
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I have to assume that by adding shit that no one really cares about, all the various UI and glitches in 10 are fixed?
I have a serious question for you since it appears you don't understand how a large company works: Do you actually want important UI and bug fixes to be worked on by the same people designing and coming up with shitty news feeds in your taskbar?
What next, you think Karen from accounting should go down to the shop floor and help Tesla fix panel gaps?
Re: So...all the bugs must be fixed then? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I suppose he perhaps hopes they night hire more of the serious bug fixer folks, and less of the shitty widget designers when allocating their capital
And do what? There's a steady stream of bug fixes that constantly come in through windows update. At some point throwing more people at a problem doesn't fix anything.
Also since this is a conversation we're having on Slashdot how would the GP get the bug fixes? I mean pretty much everyone here does everything in their power to disable updates...
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And do what?
Fix the things he would like fixed, as suggested in his comment, instead of working on news feeds etc. You know, you can actually scroll up and read his comment still. I'm going to ignore your claim that MS have reached the arbitrary point where they couldn't hire an additional person to work on those things. It really seems to me that it is you who don't understand how large companies work, not the OP.
Re: So...all the bugs must be fixed then? (Score:3)
No, she's too busy complaining.
Anyone but Karen.
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They add features in a desperate hope you will notice the new shiny and forget about all the old broken rusty.
Never works of course, but hope springs eternal.
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nOPE (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't like it when it was crapware, definitely don't want it as part of the OS.
Storage capacity has become a concern again with SSDs. Please, don't shovel this crap onto me.
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I'm not sure that storage capacity is really an issue even with SSD as your main storage media. You can get a 500GB SSD for less than $100. If you need more than that it is easy and cheap to find external devices that can store more data. I would hazard to guess that the new weather and news task bar item adds less than 1GB of storage (and probably much less) so it shouldn't really be a problem even on an SSD.
Re: nOPE (Score:2)
Wow, I'm old. Barely adding a gigabyte to run a widget?
My first HDD was 200 megabytes and I was the bloated plutocrat; most friends had half of that.
The first CD rom I saw contained more than 120 games. Back then I thought you would only ever need 10 discs worth of storage for your entire life.
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I have absolutely no idea how much actual storage these "widgets" will take up so decided to error on larger size. I would be rather surprised if they come anywhere near this size in reality but if I had said they will only take up a few hundred megabytes I figured I would have a lot more post saying that I was underestimating the storage requirements. 8^)
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Slide rules rule.
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There are plenty of laptops being sold with 250 GB SSDs. A current Windows 10 install with all the fat trimmed - Page file shrunk, user-removable components removed, Windows Update and other temp files cleared - will eat up almost a third of that.
More concerning to me are the wear issues. Sitting near full capacity on an SSD isn't benign like it is on a spinning disk. Each memory cell can be written X times before it dies. If your SSD is sitting at 80% capacity, most of the cells can't be written to. The re
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I have a laptop with a 128GB SSD and a fresh install of Windows 10 without "all the fat trimmed" was way less than the ~80GB you say an install with "all the fat trimmed - Page file shrunk, user-removable components removed, Windows Update and other temp files cleared" would be. According to this site a fresh install of Windows 10 is ~15GB. https://www.getfilecloud.com/b... [getfilecloud.com]
If your laptop only has 250GB SSD in it and you are filling it up I would assume that either you are hording a lot of data that could be
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Your site is wrong, or at least old. It's dated 4 years ago. Windows 10 goes through "feature updates" several times a year. Microsoft [microsoft.com] quotes 20 GB, and you know that's a lowball.
The laptop I'm looking at was bought new a few months ago. It's not used for torrents, media collection, gaming, anything like that is on another machine. It has a typical set of applications installed - Firefox, OpenOffice Writer (not the full suite), McAfee. The OS was installed by Dell, so some of it might be Dell crapware, but
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
I could also (Score:3)
shove a fork through my eyeball and into my brain. But I think I'll opt out of that too.
Oh, you mean exactly like the Mac? (Score:3)
Re: Oh, you mean exactly like the Mac? (Score:2)
20 minutes after "upgrading" to windows 10 (Score:1)
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True but they finally got search to work right after 30 years so there's less need in Win10 to have 5 million task items.
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That's the only beauty in MS Windows. Ten ways to do anything.
Holy shitballs, Batman! (Score:3)
Better hold on to your cape and mouse pad for this one! Behold! The Big Update! Another fucking weather widget.
News? You mean Microsoft's own branded flavor of clickbait bullshit? Telemetry with a pile of fresh steaming bias. No thanks.
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If someone hacks the site and hosts malware on it, that's a way to 0wn a fuck load of Win10 boxen.
Probably the #1 reason we hate pointless feature-creep. Let's at least hope they don't trash the LTSC variant.
Microsofts new Security & Telemetry slogan: The Clicks Are Worth The Risks.
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RSS v2.0 (Score:3)
Now with data harvesting and ads everywhere!
Wow! (Score:3)
These kinds of desktop features are anachronisrtic (Score:2)
There was a time when they made sense -- the desktop was the digital switchboard of your life. Now that role is played by your phone, and the more stripped down your desktop is, the better. That's why I use at tiling window manager -- it does literally nothing but arrange to share the screen between apps and provide a clipboard.
Don't gotta be a genius (Score:3)
It's obvious.
Sales of consumer Windows SKUs have zero growth. Nobody buys boxes of Windows anymore, they get it when they buy a new laptop. They buy new laptops less and less often, and sometimes they switch to Chromebooks.
Online services, on the other hand, can be monetized. Google is the prime proof of this. But while Microsoft has been developing fairly high-quality services for many years now, they were late to the party and few people see a need to switch from what they already get from Google.
The answer? Build them into everything Microsoft can find -- phones, the browser, the OS -- and make the user figure out how to turn them off.
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Nobody buys boxes of Windows anymore
What do you mean "anymore"? People haven't done that since Vista was released. This isn't something new.
again? (Score:2)
Didn't we already go through the "widgets" thing with 8.1 and it turned out to be a security nightmare? Have they learned from their mistake this time?
More SPAM? (Score:2)
No! (Score:1)
Oh boy! A widget! (Score:1)
Something ELSE to clean out of Windows to keep an install clean and crap-free.
So stuff I do not care about? (Score:3)
This thing is now basically bloatware, nothing else.
Big Update? (Score:1)
Taskbar Clutter, requiring Edge (Score:1)
Awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
I think we had this on NeXT some 30 years ago, and on Linux some 25 years ago. (these sorts of toys started showing up around fvwm, I think). But I think really I'd rather have an ASCII art weather station [hackaday.io]
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So .... (Score:3)
PointCast is back?
Hated it the first time. Don’t think this’ll be any better.
Both of you that actually remember PointCast, raise your hands ...
Big Update? (Score:2)
If adding a couple of widgets to a rectangle with other widgets is a big update, then any change is.
Great... (Score:5, Interesting)
Another thing to turn off after install. My current list:
-Search
-Cortana button
-Task View button
-People on taskbar
-Meet button
Then uninstall all the squares in the start menu.
This is getting to the point where I might just write a script to do it.
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At home it doesn't come up. I haven't done a truly fresh install on my personal desktop in so long that there's nothing to remove. At least not that I care enough about to bother with. Come to think of it, I think the last time I paid for windows I bought Win7 Pro, then took th
Imagine your OS making news headlines (Score:1)
A source of awful clickbait stuff (Score:1)
does anyone care? (Score:1)
Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
And as with all these things:
How do I get that to fuck the fuck off, before I ever use it?
I literally set up a new laptop, phone and tablet in the last year and "news" and "weather" are the two things I disabled / removed from them all as my first round of "shit I don't want on my device screen / connecting out to the net".
Removed the weather widgets on my phone. Uninstalled the news apps. Same on my tablet.
Removed the weather and news Metro apps on my laptop (and all others, because I literally then just removed all visible signs of Metro).
I don't want even Microsoft to have a full, permanent log of my location sent to them on a regular basis over the Internet.
And I don't want what THEY think I should be told on my desktop. It's really not hard to understand.
My desktop is blank. The services are minimal. My phone home screen is a set of categories of apps of my choosing, in my order, no widgets, and everything I don't want uninstalled or disabled. If I wanted to check news and weather, I'd have apps for them, or I'd go on a news or weather website of my choice.
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Sounds kinda dumb. (Score:2)
So? Did someone think that was a significant time-saver? Were millions of users frustrated by the horrible inconvenience of clicking the start menu? Probably not.
Hell, is it even worth mentioning? Is it worth the bother of complaining about it having been mentioned? Probably not, but sometimes I like to complain.
ok so that's fine... (Score:2)
Can you turn it off?
Oh, people still use windows? (Score:2)
Bloat, bloat, bloat, here's some stats 1/2 (Score:2)
Yeah, keep adding useless features so that more users start reading the clickbaiting guides that appear first on google search results on how to remove them, thinking that they know how to follow instructions and trusting a big internet site, resulting in their PCs unbootable to boot and then having to read other guides in other sites, in order to revert back the changes, occasionally making things even worse.
Let's face it, 80% of users don't know what a restore points is, a 10% that do, think that they kno
Re:Bloat, bloat, bloat, here's some stats 2/2 (Score:2)
(had to split the post, the previewer complained about junk characters, so I had to kill spaces in the table below)
Now some metrics. Two weeks ago I found by accident a russian guy's attempt to produce a "lite" version of Win10 LTSC x64 and installed it in a VM. Here are some stats on how it compares to a full VM installation of Win10 Pro. The only software added on the Pro were Adobe reader, Chrome, and a minimal Office2016. Both VMs were provisioned with 4GB of RAM.
Lite vs Full
Processes 94 - Processes 111
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So, I clicked the start menu. Now I know that it's 39F now and that the high will be around 47, with rain in the afternoon.
I think I get where you're coming from, but it really is handy for me.
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Besides, the app is often wrong.