Numen omen

One of Flock developers, Zbigniew Braniecki (aka Gandalf), has written an interesting article "What are the widgets for?" in which he expresses his doubts about the usefulness of the whole concept. At first I wanted to post a reply in his blog, but since my answer has become a bit longish, I decided to post a whole entry here.

I am going to refer directly to quotes from Gandalf's article, so I suggest reading it first.

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.

First, widgets are available since Opera preview 2, not the first build.

In my opinion, they could also add a small car racing game and/or guitar tuner.

No, it's not the same. That argument is like saying you do not get Firefox extensions thing as they could as well have implemented mouse gestures or added colourful tabs instead. Opera developers give you a tool to build cross-platform (and that includes phones with Opera Mobile) mini applications that can access the net, so you can add guitar tuner or racing game if you like, and much more!

I can hardly imagine anyone using widgets on a daily routines (...), or that someone will use Opera because of the widgets.

Again extensions analogy: I can hardly imagine any Joe Smith will use Firefox because of the extensions. He will use it because of its simplicity, security, and coolness factor attached to it. Besides, I do not think that widgets are for the average Joe (though, they are easier to handle than Firefox extensions, IMHO). They are for more technically minded people who like to tune their browser environment (and not necessary the browser itself as with extensions). Sure, you can use it for silly things like fancy display of weather forecast or calendar (and if you find it useful, then why not), but their real value is that they let you organise the small little tasks you do regularly (like checking selected news of a few websites, without requesting the feeds of all of them, looking for some info across many search engines in one place or looking up a word in an online dictionary). And what's more you can do all those things without switching to the browser window. Maybe I am plain lazy, but that is what I call convenience.

I think widgets are a Web 2.0 thing (btw, I hate the term). Browsers are no longer html viewers, they are platforms/environments for running applications too. They are becoming a sort of the mini operating systems. The great thing about them is that you are no longer tied to one OS vendor (beware Microsoft). Well-written web applications (w3c standards, anyone?) behave properly in all major browsers no matter the operating system. You can easily switch the OS and browser, and all your web applications remain functional. This together with the possibility to store your data online gives you freedom. It would be great if the widget thing was somehow standardised and implemented in other browsers to give users maximum flexibility and choice in running mini web applications (read: widgets).

Because it is a pretty new concept for browsers (widgets itself are not so fresh, but until now there was no easy way of writing cross-system mini applications) there is still a serious lack of truly useful widgets. That can make you think they are only little silly shiny things that "you can move around the screen, or disable completely." But they are much more than that!

Oh, and I am sure more widgets will come. Should other browser teams support them by implementing widgets in their products (hint, hint), faster then one might think.