The weather is particularly lovely today! Microsoft agrees, too, as the company has done some background work to improve how the weather widget in Windows 11 displays its forecasts.
Those of you out in the sun may not be aware that weather readings have been all over the place in the new operating system lately. The software titan actually confirmed last month that weather reporting and reading were broken in the latest preview builds.
Issues ranged from incorrect location detection to inconsistent predictions compared to the stock Weather app included in the OS.
Apparently, this had been going on for quite a while now:
Weather form widgets use your ip to approximate your location while the weather app uses your device's actual GPS. Because of that, it's pretty much useless. 500 kms & 2 countries off right now. #Windowsinsiders pic.twitter.com/M37tfZIwhB
— Florian (@flobo09) April 28, 2022
But the recent updates for Windows Widgets have finally mitigated this quite annoying bug, with users reporting much higher location accuracy.
Not just that, users have also noticed that the location icon in the notification area now confirms that widgets are using their precise location. In other words, the operating system is now getting your location info to beam accurate weather forecasts for where you currently are.
Just the way things should be!
Jen Gentleman from the Windows engineering team has confirmed this:
Yeah, have been doing some work to improve location detection in the recent app updates for widgets – it's why the little location icon in the sys tray will now sometimes say widgets is using your location
— Jen Gentleman 🌺 (@JenMsft) August 12, 2022
Obviously, you will have to enable the Location setting on your device to use this feature. On the flipside, if you do not use this feature, you can also easily disable it on your system.
Speaking of widgets, Redmond is currently testing an updated and more interactive taskbar widget in Windows 11 in build 25158. The OS can swap the weather forecast with stock information or different sports results, the idea being to provide users with more information in fewer clicks.