This machine previously had Windows 10 installed, and in Windows 10 I had disabled the "News and Interests" feature which placed a weather widget in the taskbar (not sure if that's relevant, but figured it might be worth mentioning). At the time I thought it took up too much real-estate and didn't really blend in with the rest of the UI very well. I've since upgraded this machine to Windows 11.
I recently purchased a new laptop that came with Windows 11 pre-installed. On the new device, I'm seeing the weather widget in the taskbar, docked to the left-hand side by itself, and I quite like it! I think the design and placement fit better with the Windows 11 UX. However, I'm not seeing any way to enable this feature on my older, upgraded machine. If I enable the Widgets option in the Taskbar settings, I just get the normal Widgets button sitting in between the Search and Teams/Chat buttons.
Both machines are running the same version, build, and experience pack of Windows 11, neither are on the Insider Preview. The new device is a Razer Blade 15, and as far as I can tell it didn't come with any third-party software installed (not even Razer Synapse — I had to download it manually). The weather widget on my laptop disappears and reappears when I toggle the Widgets option in Taskbar settings, and it reveals the Windows 11 Widgets panel when I hover over it, so as far as I can tell this is definitely a Windows 11 feature and not some sort of third-party app.
If anyone has any ideas for why it's not working on my desktop, I'd love to hear them, but I reached out to MS support and did a Quick Share with a CS agent (in addition to searching for solutions on my own), so I'm not super optimistic that this is a solvable problem. Mostly I just want to make it known that that I think this is a really cool feature and I'm bummed that Windows 11 doesn't seem to expose any settings to configure it.
