Windows 11 Gets Weather Card on the Lock Screen Just Days After Limited Public Tests

This week’s Patch Tuesday update delivered a secret surprise for Windows 11 users, the Weather card it only started testing days ago with a subset of Windows Insiders in the Dev channel.

“We are introducing a richer weather experience to your lock screen,” a January 3 Windows Insider Program blog post reads. “This includes dynamic, interactive weather updates. So, as you hover over the weather experience on your lock screen, you will see more information. When you tap or click on the weather card and sign in, Microsoft Edge opens with the full forecast in MSN Weather. Also, this new experience will be on by default. Should you not want to see this experience, you can change your lock screen status to “None.” This rich weather experience is available when you lock your screen, no matter which personalization option you select (Windows spotlight, Picture, or Slideshow).”

At the time that blog post was written, the new weather experience was only made available to a subset of Insiders in the Dev channel, and then only in the United States on those PCs configured to use US English. Despite this, it has somehow made its way to stable—possibly in the U.S. only, but who can say?—bypassing broader availability in Dev, skipping the Beta and Release Preview channels, and also skipping over a preview cumulative update release, each of which would have given Microsoft more time and pre-release exposure before just extruding it out to the world.

Yes, I know this isn’t the most serious example of Microsoft pushing a new Windows 11 feature on users in stable without adequately testing it. But it is yet another example of this disturbing trend, which can unnecessarily reduce the quality of Windows.

In its original announcement, Microsoft did note that this new weather experience would arrive “in the coming weeks.” But I noticed this feature on a PC that I reset yesterday afternoon. You can enable it now by opening the Settings app, navigating to Personalization > Lock screen, and changing “Lock screen status” to “Weather.” Unfortunately, you can only have one detailed status item on the Lock screen, so this will replace “Calendar” or whatever item you previously configured.