A software widget is a relatively simple and easy-to-use software application or component made for one or more different software platforms. A desk accessory or applet is an example of a simple, stand-alone user interface, in contrast with a more complex application such as a spreadsheet or word processor. These widgets are typical examples of transient and auxiliary applications that don't monopolize the user's attention. On the other hand, graphical control elements ( GUI "widgets") are examples of reusable modular components that are used together to build a more complex application, allowing programmers to build user interfaces by combining simple, smaller components.

Classification

Because the term, and the coding practice, has been extant since at least the 1980s, it has been applied in a number of contexts.

Primary types

A Graphical control element (GUI widget) is part of a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows a computer user to control and change the appearance of elements for operating a software application. In this context a widget may refer to a generic GUI element such as a check box, to an instance of that element, or to a customized collection of such elements used for a specific function or application (such as a

dialog box The dialog box (also called dialogue box (non-U.S. English), message box or simply dialog) is a graphical control element in the form of a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response. Dialog boxes ar ...

for users to customize their computer screen appearances). A

Widget toolkit A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a library or a collection of libraries containing a set of graphical control elements (called ''widgets'') used to construct the graphical user interface (GUI) of programs. Most wid ...

is a set of programming tools that help developers reuse GUI widgets to build a user interface. A desktop widget is a specialized GUI widget intended to run on a computer desktop for computer users to control simple utility functions such as clocks, messaging services, and calendars. A mobile widget is the comparable equivalent for mobile devices (i.e. smart phones). A web widget is a portable application installed and executed, typically by non-expert webmasters on

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

-based web pages, to offer site visitors shopping, advertisements,

videos Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) sy ...

, or other simple functionality from third party widget publishers.

Types of web widgets

*A "widget application" is a third party web widget developed for a

social networking service A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, ac ...

, with the user interface or the entire application hosted by the network service.

Social networking service A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, ac ...

s such as

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

and Myspace host these applications and provide them underlying platform services (such as display and storage of user-provided photos and other content, profile information about

end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrat ...

s and communications features with other users) through special-purpose application programming interfaces. The term is used fairly loosely, in that many such applications are more complex internally and in operation than the simple applets that are called "widgets" in other contexts. The relationship between platform and developer is mutually beneficial, with the social network offering hardware and software infrastructure, and access to the social network's

base, and with application publishers ranging from amateur developers to organized companies such as RockYou! and slide.com providing content and features that make the social network services more useful for their members. At present, there is no fee or payment between developers and social network platforms, and attempts to realize revenue from widgets (primarily

advertising Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...

by the widget applications and sale of

electronic commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manag ...

goods and services within the widgets) have been relatively unsuccessful.

Types of GUI widgets

* Disclosure widgets are specific types of GUI widgets that may be hidden or expanded by computer users. *A metawidget is a GUI widget for controlling the operation of other widgets within a GUI.

Widget engine

Free and open-source-software display servers and UI toolkits

A widget engine is the software platform on which desktop or web widgets run. The widget model in widget engines is attractive because of ease of development. Most of these widgets can be created with a few images and about 10 to several hundred lines of

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

/ VBScript

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

. A single host software system, such as a web browser, runs all the loaded widgets. This allows several desktop widgets to be built sharing resources and code. Widget engines are not to be confused with

widget toolkit A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a library or a collection of libraries containing a set of graphical control elements (called ''widgets'') used to construct the graphical user interface (GUI) of programs. Most wid ...

s. Toolkits are used by GUI programmers, who combine several widgets (reusable components) to form a single application. A widget in a toolkit provides a single, low level interaction, and is prepared to communicate with other widgets in the toolkit. On the other hand, widget engines such as desktop widgets and web widgets are intended for end users. Desktop and web widgets are stand-alone, task-oriented applications which can be composed of several related interactions on its own.

Types

GUI widgets

A graphical control element (often called ''GUI widget'') represents a part of a graphical user interface (GUI) which the user can use to interact with the program the GUI belongs to. Graphical control elements are implemented like

subroutine In computer programming, a function or subroutine is a sequence of program instructions that performs a specific task, packaged as a unit. This unit can then be used in programs wherever that particular task should be performed. Functions ma ...

s and software frameworks, like e.g.

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and prop ...

or Qt, contain them in

software libraries In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subro ...

so that programmers can use them to build GUIs for their programs. Graphical user interface builders, such as e.g. Glade Interface Designer, facilitate the authoring of GUIs.

Desktop widgets

Desktop widgets (commonly just called widgets) are interactive virtual tools that provide single-purpose services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather, the time, a calendar, a dictionary, a map program, a calculator, desktop notes, photo viewers, or even a language translator, among other things. Widgets can provide or augment the graphical shell. Examples of widget engines include: * Dashboard widgets of

Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software ...

* Microsoft gadgets in

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearl ...

, and in the Windows Live system - No longer supported, use now discouraged by Microsoft. * Various implementations for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, including Plasma widgets (available for KDE since version 4) and the widget engine used by

GNOME Shell GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3, which was released on April 6, 2011. It provides basic functions like launching applications, switching between windows and is also a widget engine. ...

(available for GNOME since version 3). Both are active and under development. * Google Desktop running Google Gadgets - No longer supported, discontinued, some security issues re: data sharing. * Yahoo! Widgets for

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

- No longer supported by Yahoo. Still functioning on Windows; since OS X 10.11 El Capitan the Yahoo widget dock is non-functioning but the majority of widgets still operate as expected and are accessible instead from the menu. * XWidgets - for

and

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

- Last updated in: 2 March 2015 (

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

). * Kludgets - for

- Allows Mac dashboard widgets to operate on Windows. Open Source, not actively developed. *

Opera Widgets This article details features of the Opera (web browser), Opera web browser. Currently supported features ;Access recently closed pages: Opera allows its users to retrieve all of the Tab (interface), tabs or windows closed earlier in the curre ...

on all platforms (desktop, mobile TVs, gaming consoles) using the Opera browser's rendering engine. Opera Widgets were discontinued since the version 12 of the browser. *

Screenlets Screenlets is the name of both a set of independently developed widget applications and the widget engine which runs them. The engine runs primarily on X11-based compositing window managers, most notably with Compiz on Linux. Development Until ...

for

and other

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating systems - This engine runs on X11 and is under sporadic development * Homescreen widgets in Maemo * Homescreen widgets in

Originally, desk accessories were developed to provide a small degree of multitasking in

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s that could only held one main application at a time, but when real multitasking OSes became available, these were replaced by normal applications.

Widget draft standard

On 9 November 2006, the Web Application Formats Working Group in W3C released the first public working draft of Widgets 1.0. The intention is to standardise some aspects of widgets. The Opera browser is the first client side widget engine to adopt this draft W3C standard. Apache Wookie (Incubating) is the first server side widget engine to adopt this W3C standard. Wookie is a server that manages widget instances and allows them to be embedded in web applications in addition to being provided for client devices such as Opera.

Mobile widgets

Most mobile widgets are like desktop widgets, but for a mobile phone. Mobile widgets can maximize screen space use and may be especially useful in placing live data-rich applications on the device idle-screen/home-screen/"phone-top". Several

Java ME Java Platform, Micro Edition or Java ME is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for embedded and mobile devices (micro-controllers, sensors, gateways, mobile phones, personal digital assistants, TV set-top ...

-based mobile widget engines exist, but the lack of standards-based APIs for Java to control the mobile device home-screen makes it harder for these engines to expose widgets on the phone-top. Several AJAX-based native widget platforms are also available for mobile devices. The growing pervasiveness of mobile widgets is easily understood. While widgets are a convenience in the online world, they can be looked at as near-essential in the mobile world. The reason: the mobile device is small and the interface is often challenging. Wading through large amounts of information in a mobile environment is not just a nuisance; it is a near impossibility.

, of all mobile operating systems, has supported mobile widgets natively since April 30, 2009. Some of the most popular widgets on the Android operating system include DashClock, Google Keep and HD Widgets.Top 10 Best Android Widgets Ever
Retrieved March 22, 2015. The iOS operating system also supports mobile widgets.

Web widgets

Web browsers can also be used as widget engine infrastructures. The web is an environment well suited to distribution of widgets, as it doesn't require explicit interaction from the user to install new code snippets. Web widgets have unleashed some commercial interest, due their perceived potential as a marketing channel, mainly because they provide interactivity and

viral distribution Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way tha ...

through social networks. The first known web widget, Trivia Blitz, was introduced in 1997. It was a game applet offered by Uproar.com (the leading online game company from 2000 - 2001) that appeared on over 35,000 websites ranging from GeoCities personal pages to CNN and Tower Records. When Uproar.com was acquired by Vivendi Universal in 2001, the widget was discontinued.

TV set widgets

Widgets are also available for TVs.

Yahoo! Widget Engine Yahoo Widgets is a discontinued free application platform for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, specifically Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. The software was previously called Konfabulator, but after being acquired by computer services company Yaho ...

is announced as a component of the next generation TV sets.

Information flow of desktop widgets

A desktop widget is a small footprint application, which resides on the user's desktop using little desktop real estate and computer resources, such as HDD and RAM. Its purpose is to provide relevant information to the user in a non-intrusive manner and using few resources. Basically, desktop widgets enable the user to view on demand, encapsulated information from predetermined data sources. Ideally, a desktop widget must present personalized content, based on the user's preferences. It is supposed to provide the most important information that a user requires on a daily basis. Most of the desktop widgets are available as free downloads from the developers’ websites.