Windows 10 users are getting an expanded ‘News and interests’ panel whether they like the idea or not, it seems (something of a familiar theme these days, we might add).
This was spotted by Windows Latest which notes that News and interests, which is an icon on the Windows 10 taskbar – that expands to a large panel when hovered over or clicked, depending on your settings – is now much bigger. We’re talking around 50% larger, or even more, apparently.
This started as an experiment tested with a small number of Windows 10 users early in 2024, the tech site explains, but is now rolling out to everyone on the older of Microsoft’s two supported desktop operating systems.
The News panel covers around half the screen now, or even more like 60% of the display, Windows Latest notes – perhaps depending on the resolution and desktop configuration that you use with Windows 10. The site observes that with a laptop that has a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600, and 150% scaling of the desktop, the panel took up close to two-thirds of the screen.
This panel mostly pushes news stories from the MSN feed, but also packs widgets on the side for the weather, stocks, traffic info, and so forth (which open further details in – you guessed it – Microsoft’s Edge browser and Bing).
Analysis: Breaking news – Windows 10 user switches off sprawling MSN panel
The first thing we did was turn News and interests back on with our Windows 10 PC (we’ll come back to how to switch it on, or indeed off, shortly) and observed that Windows Latest is correct. At least about the panel expanding to 50% of the desktop when summoned – whereas before, it took up more like 20% (if we recall correctly).
Certainly, it has been supersized, but not quite to take up more than half the screen, at least not on our desktop anyway (at 1440p resolution). Windows Latest does provide a screenshot of the panel where it is indeed eating around 60% of the screen real-estate available – which seems rather ridiculous.
The bad news is that there’s no way to tweak the size of the News panel – you’re stuck with it being as big as Microsoft wants. The good news is that, as we already touched upon, you can turn off the feature.
It’s easy to do this: just right-click on a blank part of the taskbar (or the News icon itself) and in the menu that pops up you’ll see a ‘News and interests’ option. If you hover over that, a flyout menu will appear with the option to Turn off and you just select that – the News icon will then disappear. You can also make the icon smaller (choose Show icon only), and disable it appearing when you hover over it (untick Open on hover), if you want to keep the News option, but make it a bit less intrusive on the desktop.
The choice is yours, and as long as there is a choice, then it’s not so bad, no matter how Microsoft changes said panel.
