There are several layers to "turning it off". You can use Personalization -> Taskbar to turn off the "Widgets" icon which takes care of the immediate problem.
But widgets.exe will continue running in the background, and the only way I found to get rid of that is winget uninstall "Windows Web Experience Pack"
> The only way to get rid of it is a Powershell incantation that removes the entire Widgets feature. Better than terrible news, but still nuts.
You don’t need PowerShell to get rid of Widgets. You can disable it with three clicks: right click on the Taskbar, go to Taskbar settings, and toggle the switch next to Widgets at the top of the window.
There's no way to remove the trash news from the widget thing, so blowing it away is the only option. Clearly there's someone at MSFT that keeps pushing MSN garbage (wtf is Rewards??) into the OS
I really, really hate the Edge news feed, which is also built into the Windows 10 "News and Interests" taskbar widget, and there's no way to disable the news feed without also getting rid of the weather. It's so distracting.
One day I spent hours going through and blocking each individual news provider from the feed, hoping eventually I'd reach the bottom of the pile and there would be nothing left. It's never ending though.
Are there good third party weather widgets that can live on the taskbar?
I’ve seen those screenshots too, I spent hours googling for this. But that setting is not available on my Windows. Maybe a pro vs home thing? I’m on the latest version. I don’t believe that this is by accident, I think MS decided that I’m in some customer segment that’s not allowed to not know that Jimmy Fallon might be depressed.
And even then, I can’t get the widgets feature, a pretty decent idea, without the news. I want to turn off the news, not the feature.
That hides the UI entry point, but widgets.exe continues running, along with 5-6 edgewebview2.exe processes, taking up valuable resources. If you try to kill widgets.exe, a system service restarts it :(
Unfortunately, the powershell incantation is the only way to get rid of it...
Just have to right click the task bar and change the news settings to 'reduce updates' & turn off open on hover.
Turning on 'reduce updates' just has the taskbar display the weather and not change to some random stock ticker of a company you don't care about or whatever other item of interest they feel like showing.
>3rd party add-ons to disable this behavior are just temporary hacks.
And I understand that disabling these amazing features in control panel (or that new nonsense) also tend to be temporary - until some update randomly turns those features back on.
> Regardless of using the start menu or not, there's a lot of background tracking (for user behaviour and ads) that needs to be disabled by registry edits.
That stuff also has a nasty tendency to ""accidentally"" get re-enabled after updates from many reports I've heard.
Anyway, at least officially[0] omitting the News and Weather widget is not a feature of the Pro version to my knowledge, but perhaps you found better options for disabling it? Can you enable the weather widget without the news feed? I would love to learn how to do it if I ever end up on Windows 11 again for some reason!
There's no way to turn it off. It says it's turned off, and it's still sending shit to Redmond. That's unacceptable and deceptive. I do not use software that lies to me, period, paragraph.
Worst part is it keeps running in the background hogging memory and cpu even when completely disabled. I've tried gpedit, shutup10 and so many other tools to get rid of it but somehow it comes back every time :/
There are several layers to "turning it off". You can use Personalization -> Taskbar to turn off the "Widgets" icon which takes care of the immediate problem.
But widgets.exe will continue running in the background, and the only way I found to get rid of that is winget uninstall "Windows Web Experience Pack"
reply