The answer is still the same. Don't they get the lesson? People don't want generic "weather" information if they're NOT going out, stock information if they don't invest, inbox headers in a 200px space where a notifications number could suffice, events in town when they are going to work.
It's not they HAVE to open an app to get forcefed ads. It's that they WANT to need an app to get ads. Otherwise there's no need to clutter up the empty "desk" metaphore THEY created, with litter.
People generally don't spend time roaming around within the OS, or standing on desktop screen. I sometimes goes many days before I even lay eyes on my wallpaper. 90% of the time I open my laptop, browser is already open and I get to work.
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.
Not necessarily. I've got a sidebar taking up otherwise unused space on this way-too-wide screen that shows memory usage, CPU usage, network traffic, top processes, hardware temps, and a pile of other useful stuff. It's incredibly useful to be able to glance over and see what's going on under the hood if something appears slow, or hung, or other odd things are happening.
Yes, I too hate all notifications; I don't want to have anything pushed in my face; if I need something or some information I will go look for it.
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?
Even after hours of installing third party tools I never heard of before from the internet (secure thing to do right?) I still get a occasional ad to my (single purpose and only Windows) desktop and still each time question why and how anyone would think that's a good idea, or a good place to advertise.
On Windows 10 there's a way to change the license to "Enterprise" (in the shady corner of GitHub), and then you can apply policy to not have it show shit.
Google is fucking obnoxious now too. Pixel phone, swipe left in the launcher and you get "trending" or whatever it's called. And then they saw that the auto-complete dropdown is also real estate, "hey do you want to see trending searches? We're sure you do!"
It's an interesting phenomenon. When I first started using LLMs, I was impressed by its natural language generation capabilities, and thought it could write considerably well - using elegant structures, etc and so forth.
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.
I think it’s interesting to reconsider the idea of having floating widgets in an era of powerful CPUs/GPUs and multi-monitor setups.
Personally, I love having my “widgets” active on the third monitor (the one I dedicate to “frivolous stuff” when I’m not drowning in open windows). I always keep two “old-school” draggable widgets active: a "macro keyboard shortcut remider" and a “diabetes monitoring dashboard” (unfortunately, that’s my cross to bear). I also always keep VLC running in a super-minimized state (web radio).
It seems to me like a smart way to always have certain “useful things” at hand.
If I could achieve the final combo and get back an email ticket system identical to the one The Bat! provided 1000 years ago, I’d be really happy.
Being built on top of WinUI 3 is hardly much better given the lackluster tooling experience and bugs.
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 right answer would be Win32, but apparently all those devs already retired from Windows team.
So we're left with those that only know Web, thus Webview2 or React Native. Or those whose job depends on pretending WinUI is still what was sold under Project Reunion at BUILD 2020.
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.
Great software still exists, in spaces where capital doesn't choose the priorities. We're rapidly reaching the point where almost every piece of desktop software most people actually need to create things has a competitive free-as-in-beer or even free-as-in-speech option.
Widgets seem designed by the great unwashed, for the great unwashed.
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.
I always read about people and ads in Windows, haven't seen any ad ever (both 10 and 11), I am wondering what's going on (I don't use any of them debloaters either).
I have also in the past made the same comments regarding my Windows 10/11 Professional experience.
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:
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.
Final thing worth mentioning is that PCs pre-loaded with Windows often come pre-loaded with additional crap, so I also always format, completely remove all partitions and re-install Windows fresh using an ISO from the Microsoft website.
This is a good comment with actionable tips so thank you. But its not the windows bashing that is tedious, its microsoft making its products so steps like these have to be taken or the experience is hellish. I see no reason why microsoft can't make its software experience good for consumer users AND still makes lots of money.
Yes, it's annoying and particularly egregious by MS, but is there any perfect OS out there?
Apple also regularly has quality issues and makes questionable OS design decisions. I feel more in control of my OS experience with Windows than macOS.
With Linux you tend to have the freedom to change it however you want, but I'm not looking to invest my time into understanding the intricacies of Linux when Windows exists and out the box already does the job more than adequately, and essentially hassle free, for my purposes.
It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as some people make out.
There's no perfect OS. But for me at least, ads are worse than the other flaws I have to tolerate in another OS. This is obviously a question of taste but I really hate ads in a product that I paid good money for.
Widgets are the thing OS teams make when out of ideas, said "oh God" out loud when that WWDC happened last year or year before where every Apple OS had a huge section on widgets.
Laughs from FVWM, GKRellm and so on. Or WindowMaker, Fluxbox and more with a dockapp slit 'tray' (or compatible tool).
Later KDE4-6 got a similar stack. but I remember Gnome2 having GDesklets.
Still, when in Unix can customize a keybinding to anything, (and with wmctrl spawn any window on top from their title), these gadgets are useless. When you can open, for instance, some messaging tool with the win+i keybinding, on top of everything and close it with win+q, suddenly these tiny tools don't matter anymore.
Ditto with the weather, opened windows, some shell with RSS feed (sfed for instance) which would spawn as fast as any widget ever.
Widgets always seems like a cool idea. Tons of helpful little utility apps that are quick and easy for users to view or access and developers to create. Seems great, right?
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.
The answer is still the same. Don't they get the lesson? People don't want generic "weather" information if they're NOT going out, stock information if they don't invest, inbox headers in a 200px space where a notifications number could suffice, events in town when they are going to work. It's not they HAVE to open an app to get forcefed ads. It's that they WANT to need an app to get ads. Otherwise there's no need to clutter up the empty "desk" metaphore THEY created, with litter.
People generally don't spend time roaming around within the OS, or standing on desktop screen. I sometimes goes many days before I even lay eyes on my wallpaper. 90% of the time I open my laptop, browser is already open and I get to work.
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.
Not necessarily. I've got a sidebar taking up otherwise unused space on this way-too-wide screen that shows memory usage, CPU usage, network traffic, top processes, hardware temps, and a pile of other useful stuff. It's incredibly useful to be able to glance over and see what's going on under the hood if something appears slow, or hung, or other odd things are happening.
Yes, I too hate all notifications; I don't want to have anything pushed in my face; if I need something or some information I will go look for it.
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?
Even after hours of installing third party tools I never heard of before from the internet (secure thing to do right?) I still get a occasional ad to my (single purpose and only Windows) desktop and still each time question why and how anyone would think that's a good idea, or a good place to advertise.
On Windows 10 there's a way to change the license to "Enterprise" (in the shady corner of GitHub), and then you can apply policy to not have it show shit.
Google is fucking obnoxious now too. Pixel phone, swipe left in the launcher and you get "trending" or whatever it's called. And then they saw that the auto-complete dropdown is also real estate, "hey do you want to see trending searches? We're sure you do!"
On my Pixel 8a, a swipe right on the home screen shows the "google app", I don't like that so I disabled it (home settings).
> The constraints you'll hit when building widgets today aren't arbitrary. They're scar tissue.
You get a point multiplier for rewriting parts of whatever vomit the LLM gave you.
`1 x 0` is still `0` though.
It's an interesting phenomenon. When I first started using LLMs, I was impressed by its natural language generation capabilities, and thought it could write considerably well - using elegant structures, etc and so forth.
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.
I leave typos in my text now, adds a human flair xD
I didn't spot any typos now.
AI!
I think it’s interesting to reconsider the idea of having floating widgets in an era of powerful CPUs/GPUs and multi-monitor setups. Personally, I love having my “widgets” active on the third monitor (the one I dedicate to “frivolous stuff” when I’m not drowning in open windows). I always keep two “old-school” draggable widgets active: a "macro keyboard shortcut remider" and a “diabetes monitoring dashboard” (unfortunately, that’s my cross to bear). I also always keep VLC running in a super-minimized state (web radio).
It seems to me like a smart way to always have certain “useful things” at hand. If I could achieve the final combo and get back an email ticket system identical to the one The Bat! provided 1000 years ago, I’d be really happy.
Being built on top of WinUI 3 is hardly much better given the lackluster tooling experience and bugs.
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.
> built on top of WinUI 3
The one time in recent Windows UI history being a webview would probably have been ok…
The previous iteration was actually running on top of webview2.
The right answer would be Win32, but apparently all those devs already retired from Windows team.
So we're left with those that only know Web, thus Webview2 or React Native. Or those whose job depends on pretending WinUI is still what was sold under Project Reunion at BUILD 2020.
I miss the company that used to do this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwf0EZ50KUY
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.
Great software still exists, in spaces where capital doesn't choose the priorities. We're rapidly reaching the point where almost every piece of desktop software most people actually need to create things has a competitive free-as-in-beer or even free-as-in-speech option.
I miss that style of ad. IBM, Lucent, AT&T and many others used to do them, especially on the financial channels.
Widgets seem designed by the great unwashed, for the great unwashed.
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.
I always read about people and ads in Windows, haven't seen any ad ever (both 10 and 11), I am wondering what's going on (I don't use any of them debloaters either).
I have also in the past made the same comments regarding my Windows 10/11 Professional experience.
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.
Final thing worth mentioning is that PCs pre-loaded with Windows often come pre-loaded with additional crap, so I also always format, completely remove all partitions and re-install Windows fresh using an ISO from the Microsoft website.
This is a good comment with actionable tips so thank you. But its not the windows bashing that is tedious, its microsoft making its products so steps like these have to be taken or the experience is hellish. I see no reason why microsoft can't make its software experience good for consumer users AND still makes lots of money.
Yes, it's annoying and particularly egregious by MS, but is there any perfect OS out there?
Apple also regularly has quality issues and makes questionable OS design decisions. I feel more in control of my OS experience with Windows than macOS.
With Linux you tend to have the freedom to change it however you want, but I'm not looking to invest my time into understanding the intricacies of Linux when Windows exists and out the box already does the job more than adequately, and essentially hassle free, for my purposes.
It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as some people make out.
There's no perfect OS. But for me at least, ads are worse than the other flaws I have to tolerate in another OS. This is obviously a question of taste but I really hate ads in a product that I paid good money for.
Many consider the notifications for Windows features, ads.
Widgets are the thing OS teams make when out of ideas, said "oh God" out loud when that WWDC happened last year or year before where every Apple OS had a huge section on widgets.
Seems to be part of an ongoing series: https://xakpc.dev/windows-widgets/
>Golden age of desktop customization
Laughs from FVWM, GKRellm and so on. Or WindowMaker, Fluxbox and more with a dockapp slit 'tray' (or compatible tool).
Later KDE4-6 got a similar stack. but I remember Gnome2 having GDesklets.
Still, when in Unix can customize a keybinding to anything, (and with wmctrl spawn any window on top from their title), these gadgets are useless. When you can open, for instance, some messaging tool with the win+i keybinding, on top of everything and close it with win+q, suddenly these tiny tools don't matter anymore.
Ditto with the weather, opened windows, some shell with RSS feed (sfed for instance) which would spawn as fast as any widget ever.
How about AI-generated widgets? I just tell AI what I want to see in a widget and it creates it?
Maybe simply "Show news about this topic"?
I think that's what Google Disco is:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/842000/google-disco-browser-ai...
Maybe? I really struggled to understand this product from the description and screenshots alone.
Just here to appreciate this article's clear and pleasant layout.
Widgets always seems like a cool idea. Tons of helpful little utility apps that are quick and easy for users to view or access and developers to create. Seems great, right?
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.
LiteStep introduced these in much more interesting ways than explorer ever accomplished. First released in 98, but worked fine in 95 as well.
You could have them in the wharf(preferred IMO) or more standard widget styles.
Into Windows, as it is based on AfterStep and WindowMaker.
Yea, it was based on afterstep. But for Windows. I first used it in Windows 95. Cuz explorer was an unstable piece of junk.
While it is the original title, it's clickbait.
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.
Because widgets are amazing & we are all just quietly hoping for a good breakaway easy travelling widget thing.