Microsoft has been testing a new lock screen widget experience for about four months now. The initial release still offers a curated catalog of widgets on the lock screen when you choose the “Weather and more” option. The feature was not available for everyone, but this month, more people will begin seeing these widgets on the lock screen.
The new MSN lock screen widgets are now available for everyone (Windows 11 and 10) via a server-side update, and users are not happy. No one likes a pre-configured set of widgets that you cannot adjust accordingly. Currently, a set of Widgets appears when you choose the “Weather or more” option in Lock Screen settings.
These MSN widgets include Microsoft Money, Sports, and Weather. You cannot remove the MSN money widget and retain the weather widget. Or you cannot change the settings, which is why some users are unhappy with Microsoft’s approach of forcing people to use all MSN features.
As you can see in the above screenshot, the Lock screen settings already support individual widgets like Calendar and Mail, so why not give the Weather widget the same treatment?
For now, you can only interact with the lock screen widgets. For example, if you click on the widgets, you’ll be redirected to the Edge browser with more information. Since MSN powers all these, the browser launches the feed page at startup.
If you want to completely remove MSN integration from the lock screen, you need to use the Group Policy Editor, meaning Windows 11 and 10 Home version users are stuck with them. Or you can clean up the lock screen by setting the toggle to “None”.
Microsoft previously told Windows Latest that users will soon be able to tweak each widget’s appearance on the Lock Screen. Rather than clubbing “supposedly” relevant widgets along with the Weather widget, Microsoft will let you choose what appears on the lock screen. This change is planned, but we don’t know when it will begin shipping.
Account Details at a Glance
The Accounts page in the Start menu displays the details of your Microsoft account. The Redmond giant added a Home page in the Settings app to display information related to OneDrive Storage and more. But now you can easily view that data in the Start Menu.
Clicking on the Profile icon in the Start Menu will open the new account manager. You can view the OneDrive storage info and your Microsoft account email, and clicking on any of these labels will redirect you to the Accounts page.
You will see some promotional stuff in the account manager, but that’s just Microsoft being pushy. The switch user and sign-out options have moved to the context menu inside the account manager to make space for this feature. Surprisingly, the lock screen option has moved to the Power menu.
The feature shipped with the May 2024 optional update but will be enabled for everyone with the June 2024 patch Tuesday update.