Microsoft's Weather app now displays more ads
It's raining ads in Windows 11. The Microsoft Weather app in the operating system now displays more ads.
You may recall that a year ago, Microsoft had actually removed the ads from the app, and it appeared that the company had finally listened to feedback from users. But the annoying banners are back, and there's two of them now on the Forecast page. For those unaware, the old version of Microsoft Weather was a UWP app, but the company replaced it with an Edge WebView, which is a container that uses the Edge Engine. In other words, the Weather app is technically just a web wrapper for MSN.com/weather. You can test this yourself, just open the website in your browser and temporarily disable your ad blocker to take a look at the ads, now open the desktop app, and you can see that the same ads appear in the Weather app.
Microsoft Weather app displays ads on every page
Windows Latest spotted the addition of more ads in the Weather app, and it gets worse. The advertisements are persistent, i.e. they are pinned, so they are always displayed even when you scroll down the screen.
Ghacks can confirm that the ads appear in the app, the main page displays the banners on the right side of the screen. But that is not the only place where you will encounter the ads, they actually appear in every page in the Weather app. Switch to another tab in the sidebar, and you will notice that the ads appear there too. The ads are shown on the left side of the screen in the Map pages. There are no options to hide or close the ads, unless you block some servers via the hosts file, but it may take some effort to dig in to find the information.
That's a shame, because the weather info is actually pretty good. But here is the good news, the advertisements only appear in maximized mode, so all you need to do is use the app in the smaller window. The bad news is that this trick only works with the main page, i.e. the Forecast tab in the Weather app, so the ads still appear on all the other pages.
The ads are not the only annoyances in the Weather app, you will also see news articles from various outlets, and most of these maybe irrelevant to the location, unless you change the Edition (region) in the App's Settings. You may want to consider using Safing's Portmaster app, or AdGuard, or set up Pi-hole via Docker, to block ads system-wide in Windows 11.
On a side note, the Weather app now has a fluent design with blur and transparency effects that can be seen in the menu, main page, and the tiles. The sidebar has some new options, you can now switch between the daily, weekly, monthly, forecasts, maps and other data.
Microsoft's ad strategies have been rather pushy, and anti-consumer. The Redmond company has been pushing ads aggressively in various apps, including Game Pass ads in the Settings app in Windows 11. We have also seen promotions for Microsoft 365 in the Start Menu, the Settings, and the new Outlook app. Even Windows Defender displays a warning to set up OneDrive to protect yourself from ransomware attacks.
Ja, aber ist mir Wursht ob’s regnet in Berlin…
A weather site with a good reputation is https://www.wetteronline.de/wetter/
It’s a German website but you can view whole world weather. It is subject to GDPR, the EU data privacy and security law.
My contribution to Weather sites other than Microsoft’s
AccuWeather [https://www.accuweather.com/]
Meteoblue [https://www.meteoblue.com/]
Time and Date / Weather [https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/]
‘Meteoblue’ as main here for weather only, ‘Time and Date’ deals with Time, calendars, weather, great project.
Concerning the very article, Microsoft’s Weather app now showing more ads … I lack words given I’ve used over and over those pertinent to what I think of this company. I remain revolted, but no longer surprised. Hysterical advertisement and tracking inflation. Like many other companies. Counter-productive.
Hmmm . . . the MSN Weather is supposedly the most detailed and accurate. I don’t use an app for checking weather.
Firefox is my main browser, and I simply type in “msn weather” and go to the website which doesn’t show any advertisements. It does offer some interesting stories on weather around the world.
I would use an app why?
Browsers can simplify life and take away all those annoyances that create a mindset of constantly complaining about everything in one’s computing life.
MS this and MS that . . . on and on. Never ending since XP!
Anyone following Ghacks would definitely realize this is only going to get worse. I definitely recommend checking Martin’s suggestions from back in October:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/22/how-to-block-windows-11-from-using-diagnostic-data-to-show-ads/
I’m not against ads but this is something you PAID for.
I also recommend free programs like O&O Shutup10 and Windows Privacy Dashboard (WPD) but the best option might be a different operating system.
Don’t use the weather app! It’s simple enough to go to your country’s official weather station. For example, in the Netherlands, go to https://www.knmi.nl/home
There’s also a very good third party weather site called Weerplaza: https://nieuw.weerplaza.nl/ You can even localize it to the city where you live such as Amsterdam for example: https://nieuw.weerplaza.nl/nederland/amsterdam/5575/ An adblocker such as uBlock Origin will take care of any ads which appear on there.
Microsoft no longer employs any smart individuals. I believe they have officially killed all of their inbox apps with slow and bloated webview junk. None of them are worth keeping.
Time to stop guys… “app”? You mean website disguised as an app?
Yes, more so a website with stripped features!
No, it’s an app.
A program designed to gather and transmit your data to someone else with the scondary ability to provide specific content you could view in your browser, that can be configured although not easily, to not collect and transmit your data to someone else.
@Tachy,
Your attempt at being a wise-guy seems to have gone unnoticed.
The weather “””app””” is built almost entirely on browser technology (if not entirely), and indeed uses a browser runtime to render itself, the only difference between the “app” and a website, is that it has been containerised, so that it does not open in your browser.
I’m building a desktop app using Python at the moment, it’s the same principle – to package it as a standalone program which can run without Python being installed on a client machine, you need to provide the relevant dll files which are used, despite being an exe, it won’t run properly without those dll files. Much like the weather app and it’s requirement for the webview module to be installed.
Unlike Microsoft though, the framework I use doesn’t have a problem with running multiple instances, it just works out of the box, which is a bit embarrassing. A fun flashback article quote (not necessarily digging at web technology, but digging at moving away from native app development):
9 years ago, Neowin: “In Windows 10 build 10130, you can now open multiple instances of the calculator app. Right now, this is the only app that can support this feature but sources close to Microsoft who wish to remain anonymous say this feature is coming to more apps too”.
Aren’t all apps just another copy of Google Chrome that only go to one website?
It’s crazy people actually believe this. Enjoy your bloated mini browsers that, indeed in process explorer hook edge/chromium cef dlls to render web content.
You cannot turn anything off. Already connecting to an always on service leaks data. When I check a website it’s conscious. Your glorified browser err “””app””” is always on, giving full machine usage profiles.
Enjoy the false security.
Yes. There are a lot of those apps are using Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime (apparently in corporate world really lot). I removed WebView2 thinking it’s nothing special, but a couple of none essential stand-alone programs (not even apps) stopped working fully, asking me to reinstall Microsoft Edge WebView2 for some features.
I have mostly moved past Windows. Hardly ever fire up my Windows PC anymore. Just terrible how Microsoft has monetized its OS.
Cloudy with a 100% chance of tracking, data sucking, monetized BS.