In a recent Windows Insider build, Microsoft added a new weather and news widget to Windows 10’s taskbar. Although you have to wait a while to get this widget on your Windows 10 PC, Microsoft has now added a similar widget to its Edge browser. And today we will take a look at how you can enable and use the News and Weather widget in Microsoft Edge Chromium.
Get News and Weather Widget in Microsoft Edge
As of this writing, the widget is limited to Edge’s Canary channel and I have Edge Canary version 89.0.765.0. Also, the feature gets ‘Controlled feature rollout’, a fancy term for A/B testing. This means you may not see the feature even if you have the latest Edge Canary. That said, we can expect the feature to roll out more broadly in the future and even land on other Edge channels as well. Having said all that, let’s get started.
Steps to Enable News and Weather Widget in Edge
1. Open the Edge browser and click on the horizontal ellipsis menu located in the upper right corner. From the list of options now appearing, Click Settings to access the settings page.
2. From the left sidebar on the Settings page, Click on ‘New tab page’. Here you will see a new entry titled ‘Always search and get personalized news – The web widget keeps you up to date without opening a browser’. Click ‘Launch web widget now to see how it works’ to open the news widget. You can also choose to launch the widget at system startup by enabling the ‘Show web widget when you start your computer’ toggle.
News Widget Customization Options
By default, Edge opens the news and weather widget in a vertical layout. First, There is a search bar where you can search with Bing or visit a website. As soon as you enter the search query or URL and hit Enter, the widget will take you to the Edge browser. Below that is the weather widget and news feed. If you only want to use this widget for news updates, you can choose to disable the weather card. Microsoft has also bundled stocks and cricket cards at the bottom.
You can do To change the region and language click on the Language and content button located in the lower left corner of feeding. Next to the language selection you have the refresh button to refresh the feed manually. The see more button takes you to the Microsoft News page in the browser.
You can resize the widget vertically to display more content. When I tried to resize the widget horizontally, although the arrow showed resize pointers, it didn’t respond, which leads me to believe it’s probably a bug at the moment. If you prefer a wider view, you can switch to the clipboard layout. From the settings menu.
Take a look at the board layout below. Here you will need to choose two of the cards available – weather, finance, sports and traffic. In this case I chose finance and cricket cards. It is worth noting that you have the option to add the companies you follow closely to the financial card.
Try the News and Weather Widget in Microsoft Edge
That’s all the features you can use in Edge’s new widget. If you find this widget useful, you can pin it to the taskbar by right-clicking the icon and selecting ‘Pin to taskbar’. For more such Edge features, be sure to check out our article on the best Microsoft Edge flags you should use.
