Windows 11 has been so nearly universally hated that Microsoft has pledged to improve its operating system in the coming months, with a dedicated codename “Windows K2” to go along with it. One of the first steps in its efforts is to de-clutter the visual mess in the widgets panel, previously dominated by MSN news services.
Windows 11 Widgets Panel Has Been Cleaned Up
In the Windows 11 Preview Build 26300.8346 changelog, a subsection titled “Widgets is quiet by default” reads: “We’re working to make Widgets feel less distracting and overwhelming by making the experience quiet by default. To do this, we’re testing a new set of default settings designed to reduce unexpected alerts and visual interruptions.”
The improvements are quite substantial thanks to the general change in user interface philosophy, which now includes disabling open-on-hover by default (moving the cursor on the widget button on taskbar will no longer automatically pops up the widgets panel), taskbar badging is off by default, opening to widgets experience only on first launch, and taskbar alerts are minimized unless user actively engages with the feature.
More importantly, the panel itself is now a clean combination of key information instead of the mishmash of MSN news, unnecessary features, and even outright advertising content. At least there’s a semblance of functionality when compared to macOS in this new approach – in its current form, it’s among the first things I disable outright simply on the virtue of how user-hostile it is thanks to all that visual noise.
It’s one of the few things that Microsoft has been doing in the recent weeks to win back Windows users, as competition from macOS and Linux has started to gain steam and gaining userbase at the expense of Windows. The company’s aggressive AI push and the lack of care in the reliability and performance was widely seen as the major factor in Windows 11’s reputational downward spiral, frequently generating headlines of crashes and major glitches after every Windows update.
Pokdepinion: While it is a huge improvement, one does wonder how it ended up being in this state in the first place. Did Microsoft engineers just not use their own OSes at all?
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