This week, Microsoft began to roll out one of the biggest visual changes for Windows 10 since its launch: a news and weather widget that lives in your taskbar.
No, I don’t mean one of those Start Menu tiles that hardly anyone ever uses, but rather an entirely new icon and menu that lives towards the bottom right of your taskbar.
The new taskbar button shows the weather by default; click on it and you’ll get a personalized feed of news, traffic, weather, sports, and finance. You can customize which content shows up in the menu based on your interests and the news publishers you prefer. If you’re familiar with the Google Discover feed on mobile devices, the feature works a lot like that.
You can also modify the taskbar button’s appearance; it can display a full line of text, or just the weather icon to save some space should you have a crowded taskbar like me. Or you can turn it off altogether.
It remains to be seen whether people will actually use the new feature. I liked the idea behind the Start Menu’s customizable tiles for instance, but I can hardly remember ever actually using them. Microsoft said the new feature was built with the advice of Windows Insiders, but only time will tell whether people end up using it regularly.
In any case, you should see the feature pop up in your taskbar sometime “over the next several weeks.”
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