Don’t like the new News and Interests widget? You can remove it. Follow these steps to remove News and Interests on the taskbar in Windows 10.
With a recent update, Microsoft added the News and Interests taskbar widget. It appears before the quick launch icons to the right of the taskbar. As the name suggests, the new widget displays simple weather info, news, and other exciting articles. Of course, you can tweak what appears in the News and Interests panel by selecting the specific topics you are interested in. One of the best things about the News and Interests widget is that it shows the current weather info right on the taskbar. To see news articles, stock index, and other things, you have to open the New and Interests widget.
Though the News and Interests widget is pretty good, it is not for everyone. For one, it doesn’t add anything useful for most people. After all, the news and other articles in the widget can be a big distraction. Not only that, but for whatever reason, the News and Interests widget will automatically open if you mouse over it. As of writing this, there is no way to change this behavior to on-click. As you can guess, triggering the widget on mouse-over can be pretty annoying at times as it leads to a lot of accidental openings.
To put it simply, if you don’t like the new News and Interests widget, you can remove it from the taskbar. As always, there are multiple ways to do it. I will show two methods to remove News and Interests on the taskbar. Follow the one you need.
Remove News and Interests from Taskbar options
Since the News and Interests is a simple taskbar widget, you can turn it off directly from the taskbar itself. Follow these steps to do so.
- Right-click on the taskbar.
- Select “News and Interests -> Turn off.”
- With that, you have removed News and Interests from the taskbar.
First, right-click anywhere on the taskbar to open the context menu. Next, select the “New and Interests -> Turn off” option to remove News and Interests from the taskbar.
To enable the widget back, follow the same steps but select the “Show icon and text” or “Show icon only” option.
Use Group Policy to remove News and Interests
If you have multiple users to manage, you can use the Group Policy Editor to remove the News and Interests widget from the taskbar. Once done, no user on the system can turn on the removed widget. Follow these steps to do so.
First, press the “Windows key + R” keyboard shortcut to open the “Run” dialog box. In the Run window, type “gpedit.msc” and press Enter to open the Group Policy Editor.
In the Group Policy Editor, expand the folder tree on the left panel and go to the “Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> News and interests” folder. This is the policy group that controls the News and Interests widget.
On the right panel, double-click on the “Enable news and interests on the taskbar” to open it.
Now, select the “Disabled” option. After that, click the “Apply” and “Ok” buttons.
Finally, close the Group Policy Editor and restart Windows 10 to apply group policy changes.
With that, you will no longer see News and Interests on the taskbar.
If you want to enable the New and Interests widget, follow the same steps but select the “Not configured” option in the policy properties window and apply the changes. The ‘Not configured’ option will reset the widget to its default state. i.e., turned on.
That is all. It is that simple to disable News and Interests on the taskbar.
I hope that helps. If you are stuck or need some help, comment below, and I will try to help as much as possible.