Windows 11 widgets; how to remove these annoying news feed windows in the Widgets panel?

Anonymous
2022-03-21T19:23:48+00:00

When hovering over or clicking on the Widgets shortcut the panel appears with ~50 of these stupid little windows all showing news feeds.

I don't mind the weather and a very few other widgets that show something useful but all of these news panels are pointless, annoying, and really leaning me more towards going back to Windows 10 where I can have real Live Tiles again without this excess junk.

How can we really customize this panel and remove all these unwanted news panels?

I have closed them with the upper-right 'X' which leaves them blank until the next time the panel opens.

I have chosen to 'Hide stories' from at least 100 different news agencies, but they continue to appear.

I have gone through the MS account 'personalize your interests' option to remove all possible genres of news.

Nothing removes the amount of windows shown or the genre of news that they continue to show.

I don't want to change what these little windows show, I want to delete the majority of the windows altogether so that only 4 or 5 at the most are there.

And why are these limited to these news feed type windows; weather, stocks, etc?

Why can't we create custom application shortcut widgets like in old Windows 7 & 8.1 add-ons with advanced options?

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Settings

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-03-22T04:02:57+00:00

    Hi, GObonzo

    Welcome to the Microsoft Community.

    You can try to uninstall the widget with the command. The advantage of uninstalling is to prevent the widget from sometimes starting the WebView and continuing to occupy resources when you are not using it.

    Right-click on the start menu and select Terminal. If you don't have a terminal installed, you can directly search for the command prompt to open it, then copy the following command and press Enter.

    winget uninstall MicrosoftWindows.Client.WebExperience_cw5n1h2txyewy

    I'm not sure if this will meet your needs, if not, please keep replying to me.

    Best regards

    Hinata

    Microsoft Community Support Specialist

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-03-22T15:24:38+00:00

    not looking to deny the Widget panel from working, just to make it actually useful to me.

    i've already removed this useless OS "upgrade" that is Windows 11 and gone back to the much more useful Windows 10.

    if something improves further down the road of development with 11 that makes the Widget panel and the dumbed-down Start 'panel' more useful i will consider using it again, but for now it is just a terrible GUI compared to Windows 10 for my uses.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-03-24T16:53:13+00:00

    So, if I get this right..

    To prevent the annoying news widgets from showing up the solution is to uninstall them altogether?!

    And uninstalling is better dan hiding them, because widgets that aren't being used will still be using resources?

    Think I might follow GObonzo's advice and go back to windows 10 indeed.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-03-31T01:25:49+00:00

    I completely agree. So far, the only useful widget is the weather widget. How about a dictionary widget or a translation one? maybe a conversion table calculator, a couple of clocks in different timezones, or a little display of the CPU temps or network bandwidth? There's loads of things it could do.

    Instead we get page after page of only what could very loosely be described as 'news'. Will Smith slapping someone at the Oscars, someones dog that walked 100 miles home, the latest fad diet, the latest paparazzi victim and a load of sports results I literally couldn't give two whoops about. There's very little actual real news like what's going on in Ukraine or the energy crisis.

    It asks me to customise the 'Discover Interests' page and then promptly ignores my customisations.

    It could be so much better.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-05-04T21:15:45+00:00

    Frustrating indeed that Microsoft forces news feeds on paying customers. However there is a way to neutralize the feed so it doesn't show when you click the Widget icon. Just pin a few things to force the news offscreen. I pinned Outlook, Weather, To-Do and Tips. Those 4 widgets fill the first pane that pops up when you click the Widget icon so you don't see the news. The useless news feed is still running, consuming bandwidth but at least I don't have to look. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this bad design soon and allow the user to completely turn off the news feed.

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