Widgets (23H2, M5)

Windows 11 includes a Widgets feature that consists of a Widgets button on the left end of the Taskbar and a pop-up widget board that displays notifications for important news and events, widgets, and a Microsoft Start news and general interests feed.

This feature can be annoying in its default configuration, depending on your needs. But it's also highly customizable: You can disable the notifications that appear over the Widgets Taskbar button and on top of the widget board, choose and arrange the widgets it displays, and personalize or hide the feed.

When there's important news, the widget board will display a notification card above the widgets that occupy about a third of the widget board on the left and the feed that appears on the right.

Widgets are cards that display dynamic information culled from Microsoft and third-party online services, and they appear together in the left third of the widget board by default. The feed takes up the rightmost two-thirds of the widget board by default, and it also displays cards, each representing a news or general interest story.

Unfortunately, the feed is populated with low-quality content from Microsoft Start and advertising. Microsoft claims that the content you see here will become more useful the more you use it. But after years of trying, we have never witnessed this miracle. And so we recommend hiding the feed. When you do so, the widget board will display only widgets, a configuration we find more useful.
You can learn how to hide the feed later in this chapter.
Where did it go?
If you upgraded to Windows 11 from Windows 10, you may recognize Widgets as an evolution of a feature from that system called News & interests.
The problems with Widgets
As noted above, the Microsoft Start feed is full of low-quality content and interspersed with advertising. But these issues are among the least of the problems we have with Widgets. Unfortunately, Microsoft is using this feature to drive the usage of its other products and services in an underhanded way. And this can undermine the experience.

It starts with Microsoft Edge: As with the Search highlights feature in Search, Widgets forces you to use Microsoft Edge, even if you've configured another web browser as the default: If you click on a widget or feed card, Microsoft Edge will open to display the content it links to. There is no way to configure it to behave otherwise.

And it's not just Edge. Though the cards in the feed are credited to a variety of content sources---some well-known and respected, but most not---the content itself always displays on MSN or some other Microsoft-owned website, where you are exposed to Microsoft's advertising and your activities are tracked and sold to advertisers.

Most widgets also click-through to Microsoft websites with the same issues. But less obviously, third-party widgets are not standalone items, as each requires a separate app install from the Microsoft Store. This b...