All Windows 11 users will start to see these new widget notifications in the coming days and weeks, thanks to an update to the Windows Web Experience Pack that powers Microsoft’s widgets feature. The notifications appear as live animations on the taskbar weather widget, and include alerts for thunderstorms and even ticker alerts when stocks you’re following go up or down.
When something important happens related to one of your other widgets, you may see an announcement from that widget on your taskbar
, explains Microsoft in a support article. 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.
Tom Warren
I have noticed this change myself yesterday and I have to say, like many of the changes brought on by Windows 11, I am not a fan… Having regular weather updates in the taskbar felt fine, informative enough without becoming a distraction, but alternating these with stock notifications is rapidly becoming annoying. And unfortunately, as the article mentions, users don’t seem to have any controls over which notifications can appear on the taskbar widget, nor their duration or frequency. The only option available to escape these distractions for the time being is to… disable the widget button on the taskbar altogether – an extreme solution that likely goes against what Microsoft engineers intended for this feature.