Microsoft Has Killed Widgets Six Times. Here's Why They Keep Coming Back

As long as I can control the widgets, I like them. When I'm doing actual work, I can't see my desktop anyway. I have one or many windows in front of it. It's kind of nice to be able to show the desktop and see the weather, my open todo list, a calendar, and some basic system status/graphs.

I don't want to see news or stock tickers there, but I do like to put basic facts about my day and my system where I can see them by showing the desktop or some specific widget screen.

To call it a "need" is certainly overstating it, but if some of us didn't want it, you wouldn't keep seeing iterations on the idea, including FOSS ones like conky, screenlet, and whatever Plasma calls them nowadays.

When Apple first introduced widgets, they were in a separate overlay. This was great. You could put things like a calendar, a currency converter, a translator, a few clocks, and other useful things into a transparent layer that you could make appear with a single key press or mouse corner activation. When they moved them into a separate desktop they became less useful because I often wanted to see something underneath when using them.

There was also a debugging thing that, if you enabled it, let you hold a widget while you dismissed the widget layer and pull it into the normal desktop as a floating thing. I found this was useful for a few things (translate and currency conversion, especially) where I wanted to copy a few things to the widget, then send it back to its shelf.

It's a shame all of this went away

Dear developers,

Stop treating the desktop like your own personal product. It is a place where many people do actual work. And when I am working, I want to see the time zones that my coworkers are in, the weather for when I go for my lunch walk, and stock tickers for my portfolio. And if I don't, I can cover it with an iterm window.

Developers keep assuming people want to do nothing but write code on their desktop, but most people want the opposite: flexibility and a way to get things done. If this wasn't a real user need, people would not be using it, and yet they keep asking for it.

I posted this because I wanted a quick way to find out my next appointment on my corporate Win 11 desktop.

Not having researched this much, my last interaction with widgets was with Vista, and I was surprised it was all changed now.

(Turns out, even in modern Win 11 widgets view (Win+W), there's no native MS way of exposing the calendar. You have to use a dedicated application which inevitably gets hidden by other windows. )

This article was a fascinating look at the push-pull between Microsoft, developers, and users.