I’ve seen those screenshots too, I spent hours googling for this. But that setting is not available on my Windows. Maybe a pro vs home thing? I’m on the latest version. I don’t believe that this is by accident, I think MS decided that I’m in some customer segment that’s not allowed to not know that Jimmy Fallon might be depressed.

And even then, I can’t get the widgets feature, a pretty decent idea, without the news. I want to turn off the news, not the feature.

I have Win11 Pro and it really is just those three clicks.

I’m not going to pay MS even more just to get a version that has a “please disable this one specific bit of crap” toggle. This has got to be the worst upsell ever.

It’s like you book a hotel room and the TV is on Fox News and you can’t turn the TV off. You ask around but everybody says that they can turn it off just fine, must be you. Turns out that they’re all in the executive suite and they also have Fox News on the TV, turned on by default when they enter the room, but for them the hotel didn’t hide the remote.

Can’t stop laughing, it’s a funny analogy. Im trying to find a case where the user would be okay with that but not even the staunchest fox news fan would be okay with it. I really hate this model where windows is free but infested by ads you can’t get away from. The other day someone came over to me asking if they should get a windows laptop upgrade and I recommending them getting a mac

Fox News fans would love it if a hotel (or all hotels) turned Fox News on and his the remotes.

If you have a TV in a public place people are always trying to put Fox News on. It is not because of those businesses.

It was either in 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 where each house was equipped with a radio that couldn’t be turned off but only made quieter.

My Google-fu is failing me.

On the first page of _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ there's this:

"Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely."

(Though the more nightmarish thing about 1984's "telescreens" is that they were two-way, giving the government the ability to see and hear what you were doing as well as exposing you to their propaganda.)

I had the vague feeling there was something similar in _Fahrenheit 451_ too, but I took a look and I'm pretty sure there isn't.

And people today happily buy voice assistants themselves.

"Hey Telescreen, reorder trash bags and look up recipes for risotto."

Huxley's extrapolations were much more on-target than Orwell's. He realized people would line up to buy things that Orwell assumed would have to be imposed at gunpoint.

From ChatGPT using the prompt of a description of someone ordering household items from a voice assistant in the style of 1984:

As the clock struck 10 in the morning, Winston Smith approached the telescreen in his small apartment, where his voice assistant, known as "Big Alexa," awaited his commands.

"Order household items," Winston spoke into the device, his voice barely above a whisper.

"Confirmed," the cold, metallic voice of the voice assistant replied. "What items would you like to order, Winston?"

Winston hesitated, feeling a twinge of paranoia as he considered the possibility that his every word and bowel habits were being monitored and recorded by the omnipresent Party. But he knew that he had no choice but to comply with the rules of this totalitarian society.

"Two rolls of toilet paper," he said, his voice trembling slightly.

"Two rolls of toilet paper," the voice assistant repeated back in its emotionless tone. "Anything else?"

"Yes," Winston said, his eyes darting nervously around the room. "One bottle of dish soap, one box of laundry detergent, and a package of paper towels."

"Confirmed," the voice assistant said. "Your order will be processed and delivered within the next 24 hours."

Winston breathed a small sigh of relief, knowing that he had successfully navigated yet another aspect of his tightly controlled life. But as he turned away from the telescreen and resumed his mundane existence, he couldn't help but wonder if there was any escape from the all-seeing eyes of the Party.

Pretty amazing. "But it's just a dumb Markov model," they said. "Pay no attention to the guy in the Chinese Room who suddenly seems to understand what's actually being said."

This was also part of the original Max Headroom TV series, except in this was it was a television you couldn't turn off.

That's not fiction. Not sure what came first though

Your analogy is good but I disagree with your principle.

Companies need to make money (if you don't accept this premise, fair rough but we probably have no further meaningful discussion).

I'm OK if they offer me options. Here's a free / cheap option that's ad supported, here's a premium option that has no ads.

This is a good choice! It's a good choice for all! It's when we don't have that choice that things suck! And if we want free things with no ads, that option exists too! :-)

Microsoft is using dark patterns and is gaslighting its customers about it.

The honest thing to do here is for Microsoft to leave the option visible but show a big ugly error window when lesser users try to change the setting. That way, people won't waste their time trying to fix something they're not allowed to fix.

Source: This happened to me, a now Linux user.

Look, I don’t even know for sure if this is a Home vs Pro thing. I’m just deducting that from the comments here. I’m not arguing against the virtues of an ad-supported software product, I’m arguing against the obscenely braindead way Microsoft is executing it.

If there were a free ad-supported Windows and a paid ad-free (and news-free!) Windows I’d be a happy paying customer.

Last year, I bought a win10 pro to avoid microsoft login BS. It was a $1000 upsell.

I have the non-Pro edition (Home?) and I have the setting. I think this is a US-vs-Europe thing?

There are various unexpected limitations a given Windows experience can have.

Recently someone’s laptop broke while visiting the Mexican beach I was living so they bought a laptop from the local shop. The Windows install was in Spanish and the language options offered no other language to choose from. All of the tutorials online showed menu options that weren’t there. I tried helping them change it to English.

Apparently, for some reason, Microsoft really does offer single language Windows—I found after some digging.

You still can change language in single language Windows, but it requires a lot of registry changes and restarts. Also technically it breaks the licence.

Might be a dumb question but are you the admin?

As if only admins should have the privilege of turning off obnoxious stuff on their desktop?

They just rolled out the taskbar features in Home Windows 11. I just turned Widgets off thanks to the parent comment, not that they bothered me because I never clicked on them

That does not disable widgets. That only hides the button that toggles it.

(Edit 29 minutes after, because I can't seem to post anymore:)

It still runs its webview in the background and can be toggled with the keyboard shortcut, Win+W, even if the button is hidden.

In order to fully disable it you need a Group Policy or a registry hack.

Good to know, thanks for that.

What's the practical difference?

Having a web view loading garbage in the background consuming resources and probably leaking your data vs. …none of that?

It consumes a fair amount of resources just idling.

I'm currently using a laptop that was mid-to-low spec when I got it a couple years ago. It was chugging, especially during video calls. Uninstalling the Widgets feature was enough to make it useable again.

You still get the widgets in some interactions (like left swipe from the edge of the screen). There must be a way somewhere to customize those as well, but getting rid of widgets altogether is a lot faster.

As a mac user it’s super frustrating because this is the shortcut to close a window so I see this widget flyout constantly.

I need to figure out a way to remap it but not having admin on my corporate machine I have little hope.

As another macOS user, it's absolutely insane how much worse Windows has been allowed to get over the years, and I sincerely wish that my mid-2015 MBP had never broken, because this is still absolutely awful even after almost 2 years of getting re-acquainted with an OS that I had already used for 7 years before my first Mac.

macOS was just too good.

Do you happen to know how to disable the page of clickbait I get every time I open a new tab in Edge?

I tried setting my "Home" to Google, but that doesn't seem to do it.

This worked for me when I used edge > 1 year ago, it may still work: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab-redirect/i... and set my new tabs to https://aboutblank.page

Also it's open source: https://github.com/jimschubert/newtab-redirect

The only way AFAIK to change the new tab is an extension

You can't set it to about:blank?

It's been a while since I've used the extension (I use FF now) and I can't recall if you can set it to about:blank.

Disclaimer, I created https://aboutblank.page because in some browsers, about:blank was a default white page, and ignored the OS dark mode setting. My site respects the prefers-color-scheme setting, or you can set it to whatever color you want via a query string (see https://github.com/sphars/about-blank/#usage)

You can set "Home" to anything you want, but apparently Home isn't what happens when you open a new tab any more, it's what happens when you click the Home button.

It's pretty icky, and being stuck on this Windows work laptop is shortening the time I'll spend in this gig.

Agree this is a bigger problem for me. Its usually temping clickbait and I end up clicking some of the links and getting distracted.

This seems like a good time to trot out Microsoft’s mission statement:

> Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

It’s disappointing to see them working against their own mission like this…

Click gear icon at top right of new tab page.

Sadly, Edge updates sometimes re-enable all the clickbait “news” stories. The last time it happened I finally gave up and switched to Firefox.

It’s a shame because I actually liked Edge, and it was the fastest browser in my experience.

Yep can confirm, after every update I have to go re-disable this, it's beyond annoying.

Is there a way to block all the Microsoft news/spam and telemetry at the router and still get just Windows Update?

I am willing to sacrifice Bing.