Simulation Sickness

I'll not bore you with when Opera's Widget engine was introduced or a history (partly because I am to lazy to do my research right now), so let's jump directly into the topic: Why I think that currently Opera's widget implementation is as useless for me as it is.

• Widgets only run when Opera runs: This is quite an issue for me, as Widgets as I would use them would have to be around allways and not only when my favourite webbrowser is running (which is quite often, but way from 24/7). If Opera could have a kind of Widget Server that allways ran in my taskbar I would be happy (also as Opera's allready short startup time would profit from the preloaded dlls). For further reading I would also recommend: X = hide and other similar threads (didn't find the long one I looked for -.-)
  
• Widgets can't be tied to Opera's windows: The Story behind this is a litte longer: Back then when the widgets were introduced I actually used ONE widget (yes, it was the weather forecast ) that was placed at an empty part of opera's toolbar and set to allways on top . This worked well as long as you wouldn't switch to another app. The widget would surely overlap important parts of the other apps' windows, thus hindering workflow. If there would have been a possibility to set the widget to stick with a certain window this "relationship" would have worked out quite well. Like this I simply trashed the widget and looked out of the window again.
  
• Every OS has it: My point here simply is: All the "modern" Desktop Environments have it. Be it Windows Vista/7, Mac OS X or KDE4. There's simply no use for an additional widget engine for those people (I think that the "normal user" does even ignore them as he/she is unsure what to use them for).
  
• Widgets leave a mess: I don't know if it is only me, but I'm frustrated by the clutter the widgets leave in their directory. Opera creates folders with titles like "480152960569549317251226221013" (let's call this the ID) where surely information for the widgets is stored. But I ask you: Why is the directory named like the ID and not as the widget it is used for? Why not call the folder [widget-name]-[id]? I'd be perfectly happy with that. Also one of these issues: Why aren't the respective folders deleted when the widget is deleted?
  

From my point of view this only leaves two possibilities:

• First one is to hide them better. The current situation is that imo people see the "Widgets" menu, get all excited and then judge Opera from that one feature (which would be in my opinion no good jugement). Hiding widgets would be a step backwards from the usability point of view, as it would mean people wanting widgets would have to activate them. Still it could mean a step forward in user experience, as a "not so good" feature is hidden and thus experienced by the user as "advanced feature" so he/she might expect it to be one for the pro's (and thus be not as disappointed when he can't find a good use for it).
  
• The second one would be to improve the feature and thus push user experience directly (which I would prefer although I haven't yet found a widget (in neither tested OS) that could realy convince me of it's usefulness.
  

I hope some people can get input from this and that it didn't get too flame-y. Please leave me your comments what you think about the current situation of widgets in Opera.

Cheers,
Serious