Since the first news about Opera 9, we all knew that there will be a widget system. Since the first preview build, users can touch them. But until now, Opera community and Opera company, failed to clear the signal about what the widgets are for at all.
I thought that it’s my personal problem, I just couldn’t understand the idea behind widgets. It’s nice, it’s great that it works, but what for? In my opinion, they could also add a small car racing game and/or guitar tuner. But few days ago I found (nota bene on Polish Opera Planet) Szymon Teżewski’s post where he confirms my doubts.
The only result is the praises like “Look, even with the widgets Opera is still the smallest and fastest browser!” – ok, that’s great, but it doesn’t answer the question about the usage of widgets. I can hardly imagine anyone using widgets on a daily routines (of course, there WILL be such people ;)), or that someone will use Opera because of the widgets. It makes no sense to me. Opera needs unique feature set for a longer term. To stay alive they need features that no other browser will want to have or be able to have. I don’t think that Opera will be able to attack IE’s market with them…
But the most crucial review was the C|Net one. I started watching it only because I was hoping that the man will explain the reasons for which he likes the widgets, the bright future of widgets and will show me how can I rise my internet experience with them.
Quote: “One of the exciting new features in Opera 9 beta 1 is widgets. And widgets stay with you, after you close out of your browser. And You can move them around the screen, or disable them completly. And there is a whole page of other widgets that you can download.”
Really, a musthave for any Joe Smith. I’m wondering how it’s possible that I used the web for so long without this great feature.
Update: I did not say that Widgets makes no sense to me. I love Mac OS X widgets, I use Karamba, I can’t wait for KDE 4 plasmoids. Do you follow? It’s a part of desktop, not a part of a software app. I feel strange when someone advertises a feature of some app that works because you can close this app and it still serves you. So why it’s a part of this app???