What a dreadful half-baked revamp has just been imposed upon us, and with no opting out unless you like cookies.
The new Met Office Forecast website seems to have been designed, if that is even the right word, on a smartphone for a smartphone. I can't find any redeeming feature to indicate that it has been tested on other platforms such as Windows 11, or browsers (I have Win11 + Edge and Firefox); that surely should be standard procedure.
On my Win11 laptop, the result is a jumble of data and other features. The layout looks generally unbalanced and undifferentiated, and at the same time shouty. It may look OK on a smartphone - I've checked - but again the robustness of the layout should have been tested across a range of platforms. And, insofar as my laptop is concerned, the resultant acres of white space, occasionally peppered with over-sized headers, are not just visually ugly but also an irritant to someone who craves Input, input, rather than staring into vacant space.
A comprehensive view of the entire day/week's forecast for the chosen location, instantly viewable on the old website, has been sacrificed in favour of a little bit of this and a little bit of that. In my setup (which is no way extraordinary), this means that the initial chart - a mere summary - of weather data requires three 'clicks' forward just to cover the one day. And it is so rudimentary: wind speeds are labelled 'strong' or whatever, but nothing there to indicate actual speed or direction. It's also needlessly, even unhelpfully, repetitious.
So, suppressing a yawn, you must then scroll. Past a map - a colourful if rather ugly distraction, and IMO hardly a priority in the scheme of things - onwards to the [Location] Overview together with a tab for that chosen location's Detailed Forecast (DF).
At last. Here under the DF tab I can see the day's full forecast, with eg wind speed and gusts in mph, plus wind direction, plus a selection of other filters, eg snow/rain, sea, humidity, UV. And, depending I guess on your chosen location (it's probably not very helpful halfway up Pen y Fan), data re tides, waves, etc is prominently offered in location Overview. Now that is excellent.
But blink, as I did, and you'll miss the link under DF to "Tomorrow's" forecast - it's actually to the next few days though you can't instantly select one day or t'other. What's more, if you should happen to change the day under DF, you're stuck with that changed day if you then switch back to Overview and want to see a summary of another day. Clunky.
(One curiosity... As I clicked through the days in DF I found that the colour settings changed here and there in Edge for some reason, though not in Firefox).
It may not be a particularly big deal, but there's no facility from the start to switch between celsius and fahrenheit. Nope, in the layout on my Win11 device you have to scroll down to the [Location] Overview/Detailed Forecast area to find the toggle. Oh dear, shades of 'he marched them up to the top of the hill, and he marched them down again...'
In sum, though previously I rated the Met better than the Beeb for the forecasting of weather in my neck of the woods, a well-ordered display of data counts for a lot. I cannot be faffed to engage with such a disordered layout, so the Met Office has been booted from my bookmarks until it cooks up something better. BBC Weather remains there, alongside Windy (which presents a different view, sometimes even different weather).
Btw how does one change the default location...? I want mine to be xxxx (Beach) not simply xxxx. But it appears uncle M (not auntie B for once) knows best.