Earlier this year, Microsoft started testing a new feature on the taskbar called “News and Interests”. It is basically a widget based on Microsoft’s MSN and users can glance at the feed on their taskbar to get personalized content based on their web browsing activities. In addition to the personalized news feed, you can also get weather and traffic updates. Windows 10’s News and Interests feed is similar to Google Discover and it’s not a bad concept for those who want news and updates on their taskbar, but it needs serious refinement to be useful. With June 2021 update, Microsoft is rolling out the new feature to all consumers over the world. Based on the reports we’ve seen, it appears to be a wider rollout and it is enabled when users install the latest mandatory security update. Once installed, a new weather icon will appear on your taskbar. If you hover over the weather icon, you’ll see the latest news, traffic and weather updates. However, Microsoft’s News and Interests feed is far from perfect and it’s plagued with numerous quality issues. For instance, some users claim there’s an issue with the News and Interests feed where the weather widget icon is blurry. “The new feature is cool, but for some reason, only the text is very blurry on 100 percent scaling, but on 150% it’s fine along with 175% & 200%. The issue does not appear on my laptop with 125% scaling,” a user explained the problem in a post on Feedback. Similarly, some people said that the text on the taskbar button will look pixelated on high-resolution screens when the feature is enabled or disabled. I was able to reproduce this bug on my device running Windows 10 version 21H1. News and Interests feed has other issues too. Some users flagged localization issue where the feed will show news headlines from different countries in an incorrect foreign language. “I’m in Finland and when I change the language, it changes to English but after a while, it reverts back to Finnish. My device is in English US, the region from Windows settings is the United States and no Finnish language pack nor keyboard layout is installed,” a user explained the problem. Stale weather information in News and Interests The default view of the weather widget seems to base its information on both your location setting and system setting. However, we observed that the weather widget can show stale information after login. In my case, it showed me that the sky is mostly cloudy, but that was not the case when I looked outside my window and compared the stats with other weather apps. Microsoft released the unpolished version of News and Interests Microsoft is apparently aware of these and they fixed the bug where “content of taskbar button would look blurry” and incorrect weather report in preview builds released way back in January. For some reasons, the company decided to roll out the unpolished version of News and Interests to consumers and enterprises. The post Windows 10’s news and weather feed on taskbar is a mess appeared first on Windows Latest
News and Interests feed has other issues too. Some users flagged localization issue where the feed will show news headlines from different countries in an incorrect foreign language. “I’m in Finland and when I change the language, it changes to English but after a while, it reverts back to Finnish. My device is in English US, the region from Windows settings is the United States and no Finnish language pack nor keyboard layout is installed,” a user explained the problem. Stale weather information in News and Interests The default view of the weather widget seems to base its information on both your location setting and system setting. However, we observed that the weather widget can show stale information after login. In my case, it showed me that the sky is mostly cloudy, but that was not the case when I looked outside my window and compared the stats with other weather apps. Microsoft released the unpolished version of News and Interests Microsoft is apparently aware of these and they fixed the bug where “content of taskbar button would look blurry” and incorrect weather report in preview builds released way back in January. For some reasons, the company decided to roll out the unpolished version of News and Interests to consumers and enterprises. The post Windows 10’s news and weather feed on taskbar is a mess appeared first on Windows Latest 