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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
