Microsoft Weather now serving ads on each page

Last year, Microsoft decided to remove all advertising from the Weather app. Obviously, this was a decision welcomed by virtually all of its users. Sadly, the happy days are over, and now those who use Microsoft Weather to check their local forecasts for weather, polen, and historical stats are also forced to watch ads. This isn't a simple one-time-off business because the ads are both persistent and present in all subpages of the app.

Microsoft Weather comes with ads on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. In Windows 11, the user will bump into ads quite frequently. Microsoft Edge also comes with ads, not to mention the aforementioned weather app. The ads were added via a server-side update, and there's no way to escape them while using the app because they show up on every page. Even worse, they are also pinned, so scrolling down whenever that is possible doesn't help either.

How can anyone avoid these ads? On some systems, resizing the app window to make it small enough so that the ads go away might do the trick. The change cannot be rolled back since Microsoft Weather, formerly one of the several UWP apps introduced by the Redmond-based tech giant, is now an Edge-based WebView piece of code. As a consequence, it simply loads msn.com/weather in an Edge container.

Those interested in a different perspective on Microsoft's iconic product should check out Paul Thurrott's Windows Everywhere: The rise and fall of the most important software platform of all time, which is only available for Kindle and carries a price tag of $19.99.