Remember Active Desktop?

Image: Screen Grab of Desktop by Jason Bean

I was reminded today of a feature I’d long forgotten about in Windows. The ability to place "active" content that was regularly updated via the Internet. When the feature first came out I guess you could call it the grandfather of what we now called widgets and sidebars, except before you could just put stuff wherever you wanted on your desktop, not just docked to a side of the screen.

Anyway, I was reminded of it today when I was checking some of my desktop settings to see if I could enlarge the icons on my desktop. Mainly to test a new icon file I had created, because I really abhor large icons most of the time.

I checked on the option to set my existing homepage as my desktop active item and BAM!, there’s my iGoogle homepage sitting on my Desktop. Everything is active on it like a webpage, but I can drag my icons on top of it wherever I want as well. I’m still intrigued by how that can happen and not interfere with each other, but they figured it out.

Does anyone use Active Desktop now?

My question is, does anyone still use this? How do you use it? Do you just have one web page being displayed? What page do you use?

Would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this topic.