Don’t like the ‘News and interests’ panel in Windows 10? You’ll hate Microsoft’s new supersized version even more – but luckily, it’s easy to turn off

News and interests now takes up half the screen – or apparently more, in some cases

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Windows 10users are getting an expanded ‘News and interests’ panel whether they like the idea or not, it seems (something of afamiliar theme these days, we might add).

This was spotted byWindows Latestwhich notes that News and interests, which is an icon on theWindows 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 ofMicrosoft’s two supported desktopoperating 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 browserandBing).

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.

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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 toTurn offand you just select that – the News icon will then disappear. You can also make the icon smaller (chooseShow icon only), and disable it appearing when you hover over it (untickOpen 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.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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