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
    2023-01-09T06:09:48+00:00

    You realise if you don't like the news feed you can disable it. Not sure why you don't get fox news as I get a heap of them if I turn on the feed. It's a shame it's not more customisable, but no one cares what your personal political and religious views are, not every conversation online has to be a platform for that stuff.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-01-10T07:22:30+00:00

    Because of that trash sidebar with all that trash info I'm considering switch to apple. I prefer to pay idiot tax than getting distracted with that news feed every time I'm trying to swipe something from left to right.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-01-10T10:56:37+00:00

    I turned off all the notifications, and the 'open widgets on hover' in the settings for the widgets panel, and now at least I can have the weather app in the corner without the popup and red dot nonsense

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-02-05T13:44:42+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

    Thanks for your suggestion...but:

    Image

    So what changed that this command isn't even recognized? Seems very strange to me...

    Edit: Here's the work-around I came up with using OpenShell. Created a Windows 7 style start menu and used a small Win7 button icon which nicely covers the widget button but still shows the weather. Hovering on the weather opens the (dopey) widgets - clicking on the start button opens the Windows 7 fully customizable Windows 7 style Start Menu!

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-02-15T22:00:52+00:00

    On the left side of the toolbar where the old START used to be, open the widgets panel. Click your photo on the top right of the widget panel. Un toggle the 3 toggles to turn off the Widget Behaviors. The weather will stay on the bottom left of the toolbar, but it will not open by having the mouse pointer hover over it.

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