Turn Off News Feed in Windows Widgets

As promised at the Build conference a year ago, the news feed in the Widgets panel can finally be turned off, giving you double the space for the widgets you choose, while keeping you more secure and isolated from clickbait drivel and malware.

The news feed in the Widgets is powered by Microsoft Start, which is really just the clickbait you see on your grandma’s MSN and Yahoo homepages. At best this is trivial provocative junk just to earn a few fractions of a cent of ad revenue off anyone gullible enough to click on it (so basically just a modern extension of supermarket tabloids hawking Hillary Clinton’s alien baby or whatever), but these ad-farming sites can also be dangerous from a security standpoint, so much so the FBI recommends you use an ad-blocker.

Even once-reputable sites like WindowsCentral.com use advertising in these widgets to push dangerous recommendations to unsuspecting users that would unwittingly trust the publications. For example, they recently ran a paid advertising campaign suggesting that nostalgic Windows fans run “just one terminal command” to bring back some old design styles from previous versions of Windows:

The problem? This “one command” actually is a remote script that does hundreds of things to your system, leveraging illegally distributed and cracked software files, it runs a kill switch for the system antivirus, and then modifies nearly all system and boot files, destroying any bit of security on modern UEFI systems, opening exploits like rootkits that can’t be removed by “simply” formatting your drive (as if that’s a walk in the park for everyone). Any user that follows the article might think a site like that wouldn’t encourage you to type a single command that destroys their entire PC system, but there it is, the Microsoft Widgets panel pushing an ad suggesting just that.

So please, do yourself a favor and turn off the news feed. Just click the ⚙️ icon at the top of the feed, choose Show or Hide Feeds, and turn off Microsoft Start. While you’re there, you can also turn off the “open on hover” toggle so the widgets only open when you actually click their button and not merely brush near it with the cursor.

After you click it the news feed will restart. Afterwards, where previously you only received one-third of the available space for your own widgets, you now get two columns that you can arrange however you like, with the widgets you want. I use mine to see weather, traffic, my phone’s own notifications through Phone Link, and more.

Consider Signing-in to the Start feed before you turn it off

Yes, you read that correctly. The reason is that the widgets like To-Do and Outlook will use whatever account you had been using in the widgets before you turned off the feed, and turning off the feed hides the sign-in option so you won’t be able to change it afterward. For most people this is probably the same consumer grade Microsoft account you use to login to the PC.

However, in my case I wanted the widgets to use my “work” Microsoft account for calendar/tasks, so I signed into that account in the Start feed before turning it off, leading to the result you see just above while also using my preferred account being used for those widgets.