Weather widget settings and privacy in ExplorerPatcher

What the section looks like

The picture is Windows 11 25H2 on Arm64 with ExplorerPatcher’s taskbar and the widget switched off. The section shows only “Show Weather on the taskbar” and a link to upstream’s weather page. Once you tick the switch, the other options in the table below appear, plus the time of the last update and two links: Update weather now and Clear weather widget local data. With the Windows 11 taskbar the Properties window on our two Windows 11 machines had no Weather entry in the left-hand list at all (see the settings hub for the full section lists), because the widget is built for the Windows 10 style taskbar. Our Windows Server 2022 machine, which has a Windows 10 shell, kept the Weather entry in both of our views.

Overview

All weather settings

How the widget works

According to upstream’s wiki and source, the widget sits at the right end of the task list, where the old People button was. It runs in a separate COM surrogate process, not inside Explorer. That process opens a Microsoft WebView2 window, loads a Google search page for “weather” plus your location, and shows only the weather box from it. A click opens a larger panel with the forecast, which is the same box Google shows in its search results. ExplorerPatcher cuts the page down to the box and picks the layout you chose: icon and description, icon and temperature, icon only, temperature only, or temperature and description.

We turned it on with the Windows 10 (ExplorerPatcher) taskbar on all three machines and waited about 70 seconds before the screenshot. The widget showed an icon, a temperature and a description next to the tray each time, but the weather differed per machine, probably because, with the location box empty, Google picks the place from the machine’s IP address (upstream’s description). Windows Server 2025 showed “23 °C Mostly sunny”, Windows 11 25H2 (Arm64) showed “7 °C Mostly cloudy” and Windows Server 2022 showed “24 °C Mostly sunny”.

What it loads and where your data goes

This is what upstream’s code and wiki say. We have not captured the widget’s network traffic ourselves, so none of this is a measurement.

• It needs WebView2. WebView2 is a Microsoft component separate from the Edge browser. If it is missing, you see the regular People button instead of the widget, and ExplorerPatcher itself keeps working.
• It contacts Google. The page it loads is www.google.com/search with a weather query, your language code and your location text. With the location box empty, Google picks the place from your IP address, as upstream’s wiki describes. Google’s own cookies and privacy terms apply to that page.
• Icons can come from GitHub. The default icon pack, Microsoft, replaces Google’s icons with images that the widget script downloads from user-images.githubusercontent.com, GitHub’s image host. Choosing the Google icon pack in the settings removes that step.
• Geolocation is refused by default. The widget answers the page’s browser location request with “deny” unless a hidden value, WeatherLocationType, is non-zero. See hidden settings.
• Data folder. The WebView2 profile is stored in %APPDATA%\ExplorerPatcher\ep_weather_host. The Clear weather widget local data link asks for confirmation, then removes that folder and keeps your preferences.
• No telemetry in ExplorerPatcher itself. Upstream’s wiki says the project has no built-in telemetry. That does not cover Google or GitHub, which see requests like any website would.

If you do not want a Google page loading on every login, leave the widget off. It is off by default.

What to change first

1. Taskbar style. Use Windows 10 (ExplorerPatcher) in the Taskbar section and restart File Explorer.
2. Switch it on in the Weather section. The widget appears next to the tray.
3. Location. Leave it empty for an IP-based guess, or type a place the way Google understands it. Upstream’s advice: if “weather in Bucharest” works in a normal search, type just “Bucharest”. For a ZIP code, “weather in zip 90210” works, so type “zip 90210”.
4. Layout, unit and frequency. The defaults are icon and description, Celsius and an update every 20 minutes. A shorter interval means more requests, so we would keep the default.

Combinations and traps

Language is a two-letter code. Type en, de, fr and so on in the Language box. It changes the text Google returns, not Windows’ language.

It depends on Google’s page. The widget reads the weather box out of a page that Google controls. The script throws “Google weather icon not found; page layout may have changed” if the icon is missing, so a change on Google’s side can break the widget until ExplorerPatcher is updated. If it shows an error or stays blank, try Update weather now, then Clear weather widget local data, then see weather not working.

If the desktop breaks after you switch it on. Upstream’s recovery steps: press Ctrl+Alt+Delete, open Task Manager, choose File, Run new task and start regedit.exe with administrator rights. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\People, set PeopleBand to 0, then start Explorer again from Task Manager. The weather switch is Windows’ own PeopleBand value, not an ExplorerPatcher value. We did not need these steps. If you cannot reach the desktop at all, use the black screen guide.

Corner preference is Windows 11 only. It is hidden on Windows 10.

Debug mode. Upstream documents a hidden value, WeatherDevMode, that turns on browser developer tools for the widget. It is only useful for tracking layout bugs, see hidden settings.

The widget is one of several things that ExplorerPatcher adds beyond the Windows 10 look, so for the wider picture see how it works and is ExplorerPatcher safe.