What ever happened to foog ol' Active Desktop?

CSU

***title should read *good ol'* LoLz***
Anyone have any idea of the reasoning why MS dropped this feature?

I used to make use of it with a dozen or so feed's and graphs for my desktop which was indeed very handy, but now all we have is the bucket loads of crap in the form of widgets and gadgets which 99% of are poorly written, use waaay too much system resources and just look terrible.

:mad:

BopNiblets

Yeah the idea was to replace that stuff with widgets and gadgets.

I never used either though.

Mycroft H

It used quite a lot of resources as far as i remember, plus having the web integrated into the desktop opened a lot of security risks

testicle

The EU put paid to it, integrating the Browser with the Desktop.

It was removed from Vista, not sure of why but I can assume security problems, legal issues with the EU or US and also that it was a massive performance hog.

Dan Dare

I don't think Active Desktop featured in XP either, never used it myself.

Dan Dare

Dan Dare wrote: »

I don't think Active Desktop featured in XP either, never used it myself.

It was there but rarely used. If you chose the "Lock Web items on desktop" option in the desktop context menu it would force it on. From my experiences it was mostly used by malware to change your wallpaper to a scareware page.

This is the configuration tab for the Active Desktop in XP, it just isn't labelled as such.

Capt'n Midnight

It was one of the first things you turned off for performance and security in older versions of windows

Capt'n Midnight

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

It was one of the first things you turned off for performance and security in older versions of windows

Older versions (pre-XP) required the Active Desktop to be on to use JPEGs or GIFs as wallpaper, due to the performance hit I often converted the file to a BMP beforehand rather than kill the machine by using the JPEG directly. XP can't use JPEGs or GIFs directly either, but rather than turn on the Active Desktop it silently converts it to a file called Wallpaper1.bmp in the user folder and displays that rather than the original.

astrofool

Karsini wrote: »

Older versions (pre-XP) required the Active Desktop to be on to use JPEGs or GIFs as wallpaper, due to the performance hit I often converted the file to a BMP beforehand rather than kill the machine by using the JPEG directly. XP can't use JPEGs or GIFs directly either, but rather than turn on the Active Desktop it silently converts it to a file called Wallpaper1.bmp in the user folder and displays that rather than the original.

*The more you know*

jay93

It was removed because it munched up all the computers CPU and RAM slowing down the system and also had alot of security risks with it too.
i have nver used it when running XP because of this..