Windows 11 Will Now Display Widget Notifications on the Taskbar

Microsoft will now start showing widget notifications for sports, finance, and breaking news on the Windows 11 taskbar. The company is rolling out this new feature to all Windows 11 users via a Windows Web Experience pack, which should be automatically installed via Windows Update.

“Your taskbar should show weather most of the time, but when something important happens related to one of your other widgets you may see an announcement from that widget on your taskbar, Microsoft explained yesterday. “These announcements are meant to be quick and glanceable, and if you don’t interact with them, the taskbar will return to showing you the weather.”

If Microsoft made the new Widgets menu on Windows 11 quite easy to ignore, these new widget notifications are likely going to change that. Adding live weather information on the taskbar was pretty useful, but seeing this information being replaced by stock or sports updates can be quite distracting for some people.

Again, if you don’t interact with these live updates from other widgets, they will just disappear from the taskbar. As of this writing, though, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to disable these widget notifications on Windows 11. Anyway, Microsoft says that this new feature will be rollout to all users over several weeks.

Microsoft’s Windows 11 widgets are currently powered by Microsoft Start, the company’s news platform that also powers the new tab page on Microsoft Edge. At its annual Build developer conference in May, the software giant announced that third-party developers could now create their own widgets as “companion experiences” for their Win32 and PWAs, though we have yet to see this in action.