In Windows 11, one of the flagship features is the Widgets
drawer, which is a reboot of News and Interests from Windows
10. While Windows 10’s News and Interests is all about news and
headlines related to your interests, Windows 11’s Widgets board
collects news, weather, sports scores and stock prices in a
small widget.
Likewise, the Widgets board displays the temperature and
weather within the taskbar. This feature is called “dynamic
content for taskbar” and Microsoft is now planning to show more
dynamic updates on the taskbar. At the moment, the taskbar’s
dynamic updates are limited to weather only, but this could
change soon.
The widget integration into the taskbar should soon make it
possible for users to see finance and other updates. And it
still works the same way: you will get alerts directly on the
taskbar without even having to click the icon. As you can see
in the below screenshot, the taskbar will display live updates
from the sports and finance widgets.
The taskbar widget button will automatically switch between
weather, sports and finance updates. Additionally, Microsoft is
planning to push breaking news alerts via the taskbar too.
Microsoft is proud of the new dynamic taskbar and the company
believes the update will make it easier for users to know
something and “keep everyone informed of breaking news”.
You can click on any of these alerts to open the widgets board
and learn more about the topic inside the board. However, the
taskbar will switch back to weather if you don’t interact with
the update for a few seconds.
Microsoft is currently testing this feature in the Dev Channel,
but it will eventually arrive on Windows 11 22H2 too.
More changes coming to the taskbar
As we reported recently, Windows 11’s taskbar is also set to
get support for a
new feature called ‘search bar’ which is similar to the
search box of Windows 10.
Unlike Windows 10, Windows 11’s taskbar doesn’t come with a
search box. Instead, we have a small search icon next to the
Start button. Microsoft wants to bring back the same search bar
to Windows 11 and it will simply open the existing Windows
Search panel.
Unfortunately, a full-fledged right-click menu, which was
removed in the original release, is still missing in Windows
11’s latest builds. The ability to ungroup icons is also not
available and Microsoft has already confirmed that features
like the ability to move the taskbar are not coming to the OS
anytime soon.
