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 WarrenI 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.
even while disabled, you can still open the widgets board by pressing the Windows key 🪟 + W.
Since last writing about the latest version of Windows, I have made the switch myself – forcibly, as I bought a new laptop with Windows 11 preinstalled. I’m not exactly thrilled to report that all my previous concerns around its design were well founded – and, while working with the new OS for the past couple of weeks, I stumbled upon more annoyances.
The design inconsistencies that popped up all over the place in Windows 10 are still very much present in the new version. One of the most glaring ones is the context menu on the desktop: initially painted in the new Windows 11 style, it reverts to its older look when choosing ‘Show more options’. Old style menus can be found all over the place; for example the context menus for applications in the tray have three different styles: the modern one, the old one in black matching the system theme, and the old one in white, ignoring the system theme – I assume depending on whether developers updated their software for Windows 11 or even the dark theme introduced long ago in Windows 10.
But by far the most disappointing design update for me is the emoji picker. Not only are the new emojis horribly ugly, too glossy to the point of becoming disturbing, but the entire menu has become a bloated abomination, throwing together emojis with GIFs, Kaomoji, symbols and the clipboard history. It feels confusing to navigate between all these tabs, and having (much larger) emojis and symbols in a huge list scrolling down makes it harder to find what you need compared to Windows 10, where emojis and symbols were neatly grouped into their own tabs, which to me at least made more sense. The transitions between tabs add to the impression that the entire panel is slower and more inefficient. As before, there doesn’t seem to be any way to customize it for personal needs; I would gladly remove at least the two options I never use, the GIFs and Kaomoji.
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