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.
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