Microsoft’s Windows team may be on the cusp of addressing a popular complaint with its unpopular Widget pane in Windows 11, by allowing 3rd party widget integration.
Since Microsoft started ham-fistedly placing the News and Weather widget pane into various areas within Windows 10 and 11, users have either turned off the functionality or complained about its seemingly utter uselessness to their workflows.
However, there have been a third section of moderate opinions that see potential utility from the News and Weather widget area and simply ask for a middle ground from Microsoft so they can control the information being displayed.
According to screenshots collected by Fire Cube Studios and shared via the Twitter handled of the same name, it “looks like Microsoft is soon going to announce third party widgets officially.”
Information about third party widgets, publishing widgets and more. Looks like Microsoft is soon going to announce third party widgets officially.#Windows11 pic.twitter.com/ASRD98IMI6
— FireCube (@FireCubeStudios) January 16, 2022
Microsoft has yet to officially address the claims by FireCube, but if the screenshots are believed to be true, it seems like developers will be able to port app information over from apps that get approved in the Microsoft Store to the News and Weather pane.
The process outlined appears to be similar to a normal Microsoft Store app and the only extenuating development issues arise from memory and CPU usage as well as how to visually display the info.
Sadly, as much as I would love to see this come to Windows 11 sooner rather than later, this does feel like a BUILD conference-level announcement followed by months of testing. In other words, I don’t expect to see this fully or even halfway materialized until late Summer or early Fall of 2022.
