Gadgets, desk accessories, widgets – whatever you they were called, they were a must-have feature for various operating systems for a while. Windows in particular has tried making them happen six times, and every time, they failed to really catch on and ended up being killed, only for the company to try again a few years later.
Microsoft has been trying to solve the same UX problem since 1997: how to surface live information without making you launch an app. They’ve shipped six different implementations across nearly 30 years. Each one died from a different fundamental flaw – performance, security, screen space, privacy, engagement. And each death triggered the same reflex: containment.
↫ Pavel Osadchuk
There’s quite a few memories in this article. I never actually used Active Desktop back when it came out, because I seem to remember the channels feature was either not available in The Netherlands or the available channels were American stuff we didn’t care about. The sidebar in Vista had a lot of potential, and I did like the feature, but there weren’t a lot of great widgets and we hadn’t entered the era of omnipresent notifications begging for out attention just yet, so use cases remained elusive.
Now Metro, that’s where things came together, at least for me. I was en enthusiastic Windows Phone user – I imported two Windows Phone devices from the US to be an early adopter – and I still consider its live tiles with notifications and other useful information to be the most pleasant user interface for a mobile device, bar none. It may have taken Microsoft six tries, but they nailed it with that one, and I’m still sad the Windows Phone user interface lost out to whatever iOS and Android offered.
On desktops and laptops, though, it’s a different story, and I don’t think the Metro tiles concept ever made any sense there. Widgets as they exist in Windows now mostly seem like an annoying distraction, and I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. Does anyone even keep them enabled at all?
I tried to use Active Desktop, but it always needed a lot more RAM than I had, and was very unstable. I liked gadgets in Windows Vista, but again, they used too much memory to be turned on all the time, although it was far better than Active Desktop’s implementation. Since then, I haven’t used Windows enough on a system where I have appropriate permissions to really use the later implementations. I liked the live weather tile on the Start menu in Windows 10, it was disappointing that they killed off the feature.
I like the idea of gadgets, and I use them in KDE, but I understand why they aren’t for everyone. One of the issues I have with the concept is that they are free-form designs, with no consistency enforced. Secondly, despite the convenience, gadgets tend to be too limited in functionality. KDE’s implementation, at least in KDE Plasma 5 and 6, tend to be much less resource demanding and more flexible, which is in line with KDE generally, after all.
Angel Blue01,
I also like the ability to customize widgets. Some, like system monitoring widgets are extremely useful. I don’t use it all that much though. The main problem for me is that I multiple computers with different accounts running different desktops that don’t even support the same widgets. So I end up throwing my hands in the air and giving up on too much customization. If there was a better way to make customization persist across all of my desktops & logins, then I probably would make better use of it.
This seems like a big ask considering all the desktops I run (cinnamon, xfce, kde, and ideally gnome too).
It was always more niche than mainstream, but at the time I was a full fledged windows user and built components for active desktop. Visual Basic could easily build components to be used as desktop widgets. One I built was a multiuser painting problem that let you draw notes and sketches on the desktop and share them across other desktops on other computers. And it had the ability to play back simple animations. It was for no other reason that because I could.
ActiveX was pretty neat as a technology to embed components on the desktop, inside of documents, on web pages, etc. But it was notoriously insecure and it never recovered from the reputation for being exploitable.
The idea is still neat, but it’s obvious any implementation of it for consumer devices would require robust isolation. To have it be multiplatform would be cool. Alas, noone would agree on it.
Ohh, the lessons learned…
I remember learning the first two by trying those new features for an hour. It’s curious how they went beyond the development stage at Redmond.
I don’t remember learning the other four lessons, because… Why should I bother? I began to lose trust in Microsoft’s approach to OS development and I was also no more in my 20s and so took a more conservative approach to using computers.
Hey Satya, here’s another lesson: Everything you did since (and including) 8 is hated by power users, and they’re leaving in droves. Make 7 great again.
Windows Phone. Next to Windows 2000, it’s one of the few MS products I will go to the mat for. What a great experience that had so much promise, murdered by dumb fuck decisions. I standby it being one of the best phone OSes to this day.
In a way, I’m kind of glad they killed my boy. I’d hate to see how utterly enshitified it would be had it lived to 2026.
Microsoft made some great stuff, and i hate how critically panned they always seem to be (though many times it’s justified) Windows 2000, Windows 7, and to a lesser extent Windows 95 were all phenomenal OSes, and that’s not taking into account defacto standards like Active Directory and SMB.
Microsoft have brought a lot of stuff to the world of computing. A lot of it mediocre, or plain shite (Teams, CoPilot, the Win11 “modern” lipstick. Looking at you three) but sometimes, they have really brought something very good, to great, to the table.
The123king,
Microsoft had several internal “civil wars”. Most never become public news, but you hear about them if you are really interested.
When the “great Windows vs DevDiv” war happened, I was happy to see Scott Guthrie and folks finally get a win. After the disaster that was WinRT + C++/CX that broke .Net and killed off Silvlerlight, I was relieved they got their revenge on Sinofsky.
Steven Sinofsky famously told “I will be the CEO, or I’m leaving” and he left. (He was the head of Windows)
Looking back… my celebration was… premature.
[ It wasn’t the desktop dev team who won. It was the “cloud” against local ]
Funny how widgets keep getting retired and revived it shows how features cycle based on user behavior more than hype. Tools only stick when they’re actually useful day to day, like how mathplayground keeps people engaged through real utility. Good reminder that adoption matters more than novelty.
I’ve always found live information to be something of a novelty. Fun for a bit, but gets old quickly and I stop looking. Aside from the time & date of course.
The NeXT Dock was/is probably the best approach to it.
It can contain the icons for your favorite applications, shows the running applications and can have widgets as well – all done as tiles.
MacOS inherited the Dock of course but is is castrated …
Just searched for some alternatives .. there are a few like DockFix (also for Windows) and ActiveDock2 – guess I have to look into these.
X-Windows is still the best environment for this sort of thing. GKrellM, Conky, WindowMaker/AfterStep dockapps, etc. all work fine.
Sure Microsoft had its attempts, but who cares for widgets on Windows is using Rainmeter. There is consistency as there are themed bundles, tech, comical, text, graphical bars, dark or bright, you can edit Textfiles to adjust colours font properties etc. As customisable as it can be some even provide such features with UI. News, played music with choosing your player, email notifications, ram, disk space, time date, calendar, todo, weather etc. https://www.rainmeter.net/ There is plenty of skin sites too.
Man, I am so nostalgic to Windows 8(.1) for some reason, even though I didn’t use Start Screen and its Metro apps at all. Maybe it’s connected to that I was a teenager back then.