Widgets are and always were a gimmick. User behavior won't change without a strong need. I don't think anybody need any widget. Nobody will miss them if they are gone.
That said you can do many things with tray apps and tooltips, if you really need to. I have been making Windows tray apps lately; they're nice to make and to use.
I wonder if there would be an interest for a tray app that would pull some specific (configurable) information at regular intervals, that would be discoverable via mouseover?
Pressing Win + W also might lead to a black rectangle with a waiting circle that can only be removed via a reboot, because well bugs in a system process.
Finally, as many point out, we don't want widgets that are mostly useless gimmicks.
The one time in recent Windows UI history being a webview would probably have been ok…
You get a point multiplier for rewriting parts of whatever vomit the LLM gave you.
`1 x 0` is still `0` though.
But after a while those structures became a sort of signature of LLM writing. They repeat the same style way too much, and with enough interactions it becomes grating to read.
When I need to use Windows, I use Windows Server in Desktop mode, just to escape the ads and widgets and rubbish that the consumer version insists on displaying.
What I forgot for a long time is that on new computers I do a quick registry tweak (also possible from group policy editor) to disable web search results from my Start Menu:
> reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer /v DisableSearchBoxSuggestions /t reg_dword /d 1
I cannot emphasize enough how the 10 seconds of effort to apply the above key changes your life on Windows. Likely all Start Menu search problems you've ever experienced disappear.
The other main things I do:
- Turn off widgets from the regular Windows Settings "app".
- Change my Microsoft Edge home screen settings to make it completely uncluttered, it shows nothing except my recently visited/pinned websites. Most notably I see no MSN News trash.
Other things which make me not see adverts:
My personal PC has a personal and my work PC has a business Microsoft 365 subscription meaning that I have premium OneDrive, meaning no adverts related to it at all. But if you have no subscription and uninstall OneDrive then you see nothing about it anymore. It's worth mentioning that I find Microsoft no worse than Apple in this regard which will incessantly push you to use iCloud.
Very recently I noticed my Start menu showing results from the Windows Store, but I was able to get rid of that by following this advice: https://superuser.com/a/1933000
I find Windows bashing which I regularly see online (here and elsewhere) very tedious and not really indicative at all of the experience of people like me, I spend < 10 minutes configuring new Windows computers to my preferences and then for months or years at a time I just get on with using it to do the actual things I want without worrying about the OS at all, drivers just work, most software supports it, and WSL is awesome for when I need to do Linux stuff.
None of the recent headline Windows Update bugs have affected me personally (and I do updates promptly), while I guess it's partially luck, it may also be that only a minority of Windows users are actually affected by bad updates, while any update issues are still unforgiveable by MS, these incidents are not as broadly affecting as they may seem from seeing the news stories.
Maybe simply "Show news about this topic"?
https://www.theverge.com/tech/842000/google-disco-browser-ai...
Maybe? I really struggled to understand this product from the description and screenshots alone.
I remember installing Windows 98 and it would play an intro ad video to their products and games. Short clips that briskly walk you through them, nothing too crazy just to show you stuff they had. They had a way of welcoming without being over the top. Encarta on its own with the games it had embedded in there was amazing.
I don’t know what happened but man did we collectively fuck computers up somewhere along the way. We hardly dream anymore but maybe that’s just me getting old idk.
You could have them in the wharf(preferred IMO) or more standard widget styles.
Then everyone realizes there are only a handful of things that are actually useful and worth the screen space. Clock, calendar, weather, stocks. Maybe one or two more like todo list, post-it note, battery level, search bar, alerts, messages. That's about all I can think of.
From DOS PCs to smart phones, the idea is resurrected again every few years. A company will decide widgets are an awesome idea, create an over-developed "open" widget platform, excitedly add it to their UI, only to later decide that maintaining it isn't worth the effort and it quietly goes away. Then a few years later the cycle starts again with better widgets this time! And so it goes.
At this point it seems like it needs to be some sort of fundamental law of computing: Any device with a GUI will inevitably have some sort of widget capability that is added, removed, redesigned and added again at least once during its lifetime.
No platform has ever "killed" off widgets, and users love them as long as there's a good variety of high quality ones available.
The first thing I always do with a new phone is make sure I have my preferred widgets for weather, email, maps, calendar, and to-do. As long as they stay in the periphery providing ambient information and the occasional interaction, being without them is almost unthinkable.
Maybe the only slight improvement in decades has been the smartwatch.