Microsoft’s Windows 10 Taskbar News Feed Ported To Older Versions

Microsoft is backporting their upcoming Windows 10 News and Interests taskbar feature to Windows 10 20H2 and Windows 10 21H1, allowing far more people to access the new feature.

In January, Microsoft began testing a new taskbar news feed feature called ‘News and Interests’ that builds an interest profile for a user and displays stories based upon those interests.

Like Google Discover, Microsoft will build an interest profile for Windows 10 users based on how they personalize their news feed and the stories they read.

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Based upon their activity, News and Interests will surface news from the publishers enrolled in Microsoft’s Bing News Pub Hub service and other sources.

Microsoft initially tested this feature in the Windows 10 Insider ‘Dev’ channel but has now backported it to Windows 10 20H2 and Windows 10 21H2 through preview releases of cumulative updates.

“We are rolling out news and interests on the Windows taskbar to Beta and Release Preview rings. This has been available in the Dev Channel, with on-going improvements based on Insider feedback.”

“News and interests on the taskbar make it easy to stay up to date with information at a glance, and we look forward to hearing what you think,” Microsoft announced in a Windows Insider blog post.

When using the News and Interests app, users will invariably run out of news to read and click on the ‘See more news’ option, which launches Bing News in the default browser.

With over 1 billion Windows devices in use, this feature could dramatically increase the usage of Bing as more people utilize it in their browsers.

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Microsoft is currently rolling out the News and Interests taskbar feature to Windows 10 20H2, and Windows 10 21H1 preview builds, so if you do not have access to it yet, please be patient.