Buzz
Specifically, Microsoft is making a significant change to the Windows 10 Taskbar by adding a personalized news and weather widget. The new feature is currently available for testing and enables Windows 10 users to access news, stock, and weather data directly from the Taskbar. You can quickly check the weather forecast without opening the Start Menu, installing third-party apps, or searching online.
The Taskbar will display a compact window containing personalized content with the latest news and weather information. Microsoft leverages its Microsoft News network to provide news and content from over 4,500 sources worldwide, such as The New York Times, BBC, The Verge... The company has been managing the news supply through AI in recent months, and this specific feature will also learn which news is relevant to you as you remove or like articles in the data feed.
Microsoft is currently testing the new Taskbar feature with Windows 10 Insiders in the dev channel and plans to roll it out to all users by the end of this year. Initially, it will only be available to testers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and India.
The new Taskbar feature will also require the installation of Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge on PC. This means that any link you click on in the feature will prompt you to open Edge to read it, and Microsoft is displaying content in Reading View mode by default.
Of course, you can disable this feature, and Microsoft states that this will be an ad-free experience. It seems to be more useful than the People Bar that Microsoft integrated into Windows 10 a few years ago. The People Bar provided a quick way to access contacts but only supported apps like Mail and Skype without supporting third-party messaging services.
