In a recent Windows Insider build, Microsoft added a new weather and news widget to Windows 10’s taskbar. While you might have to wait for a while to get your hands on that widget on your Windows 10 PC, Microsoft has now added a similar widget to its Edge browser. And today, we will be taking a look at how you can enable and use the News and Weather widget on Microsoft Edge Chromium.
Get News and Weather Widget on Microsoft Edge
As of this writing, the widget is limited to Edge’s Canary channel and I have it on Edge Canary version 89.0.765.0. Moreover, the feature is getting a ‘Controlled feature roll-out’ – a fancy term for A/B testing. What this means is that you may not see the feature even if you have the latest Edge Canary. However, we could expect the feature to get a wider rollout and even trickle down to other Edge channels in the future. With all that said, let’s get started.
Steps to Enable News and Weather Widget on Edge
1. Open Edge browser and click on the horizontal three dots menu present in the top right corner. From the list of options that appear now, click on Settings to access the Settings page.
2. From the left sidebar on the Settings page, click on ‘New tab page’. Here, you’ll notice a new entry titled ‘Get search and personalised news anytime – Web widget keeps you up to date without opening a browser’. Click on ‘Launch Web widget now to see how it works’ to open the news widget. You can also choose to launch the widget on 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 up, there is a search bar where you can search with Bing or visit a website. As soon as you enter the search query or the URL and hit Enter, the widget will take you to Edge browser. Below that, you have the weather widget and the news feed. You can choose to disable the weather card if you want to use this widget strictly for news updates. Microsoft has also packed stocks and cricket cards at the bottom.
You can click on the Language and content button present in the bottom left corner to change the region and language of the feed. Next to Language selection, you have the refresh button to manually refresh the feed. See more button takes you to Microsoft News page on the browser.
To view more content, you can vertically resize the widget. Although it shows arrow resize markers when I tried horizontally resizing the widget, it didn’t respond, which leads me to believe it is possibly a bug at this moment. If you prefer a wider view, you can switch to the dashboard layout from the Settings menu.
Take a look at the dashboard layout below. Here, you’ll have to choose two of the available cards – weather, finance, sports, and traffic. I’ve chosen finance and cricket cards in this case. It is worth noting that you have the option to add companies you closely follow in the finance card.
Try News and Weather Widget on Microsoft Edge
So, that’s all the features you can use on Edge’s new widget. If you find this widget useful, you can pin it to the taskbar by right-clicking the icon and choosing ‘Pin to taskbar’. For more such Edge features, do not forget to check out our article on the best Microsoft Edge flags you should use.
