Active Desktop was a feature of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Internet Explorer 4.0 Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (IE4) is a graphical web browser that Microsoft unveiled in Spring of 1997, and released in September 1997, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for the classic Mac OS, Solaris (operating ...

's optional

Windows Desktop Update Windows Desktop Update was an optional feature by Microsoft that was included with Internet Explorer 4 (IE4, released in September 1997), which introduced several updated shell features to the Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems. These ...

that allowed users to add

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 ...

content to the

desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

, along with some other features. This function was intended to be installed on the then-current

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

operating system. It was also included in

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...

and later Windows operating systems up through 32-bit XP, but was absent from XP Professional x64 Edition (for

AMD64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mod ...

) and all subsequent versions of Windows. Its status on XP 64-bit edition (for

Itanium Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance comput ...

) and on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 is not widely known. This corresponded to version

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems ( ...

4.0 to 6.x, but not

Internet Explorer 7 Windows Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) (codenamed Rincon) is a web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on October 18, 2006, as the seventh version of Internet Explorer and the successor to Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 7 is pa ...

. HTML could be added both in place of the regular

wallpaper Wallpaper is a material used in interior decoration to decorate the interior walls of domestic and public buildings. It is usually sold in rolls and is applied onto a wall using wallpaper paste. Wallpapers can come plain as "lining paper" (so t ...

and as independent resizable desktop items. Items available on-line could be regularly updated and synchronized so users could stay updated without visiting the website in their browser. Active Desktop worked much like

desktop widget 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 ...

technology in that it allowed users to place customized information on their desktop.

History

The introduction of the Active Desktop marked Microsoft's attempt to capitalize on the

push technology Push technology or server push is a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given transaction is initiated by the publisher or central server. It is contrasted with pull/get, where the request for the transmission of informat ...

trend led by

PointCast PointCast was a dot-com company founded in 1992 by Christopher R. Hassett in Sunnyvale, California. PointCast Network The company's initial product amounted to a screensaver that displayed news and other information, delivered live over the Inter ...

. Active Desktop allowed embedding a number of "

channels Channel, channels, channeling, etc., may refer to: Geography * Channel (geography), in physical geography, a landform consisting of the outline (banks) of the path of a narrow body of water. Australia * Channel Country, region of outback Austral ...

" on the user's computer

that could provide continually-updated information such as web pages, without requiring the user to open dedicated programs such as a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

. Example uses include overview over news headlines and stock quotes. However, its most notable feature was that it allowed

Motion JPEG Motion JPEG (M-JPEG or MJPEG) is a video compression format in which each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is compressed separately as a JPEG image. Originally developed for multimedia PC applications, Motion JPEG ...

s and animated GIFs to animate correctly when set as the desktop wallpaper. Active Desktop debuted as part of an Internet Explorer 4.0 preview release in July 1997, and came out with the launch of the 4.0 browser in September that year. for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, as a feature of the optional

offered to users during the upgrade installation. While the Windows Desktop Update is commonly referred to (improperly) as Active Desktop itself, it is actually an entire Windows shell upgrade from v4.0 to v4.71, or v4.72, with numerous changes to the Windows interface, resulting in an appearance and functionality level nearly indistinguishable from the then yet-to-be-released Windows 98. Features include the option to allow uppercase filenames (the old v4.0 desktop would forcibly display uppercase filenames in title case), configurable one-click hot-tracking file selection, customizable per-folder HTML display settings, QuickLaunch mini-buttons on the Taskbar next to the Start button, upgraded Start Menu allowing drag and drop item reordering and allowing right-click context menus for item renaming, etc. With the update, Windows Explorer featured an Address bar in which Internet addresses can be entered and seamlessly browsed. Active Desktop never attained any significant degree of popularity, as its drawbacks included high use of system resources and reduction in system stability. The component was retained in

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

but was replaced by a feature named

Windows Sidebar Windows Desktop Gadgets (called Windows Sidebar in Windows Vista) is a discontinued widget engine for Microsoft Gadgets. Desktop Gadgets have been replaced by Windows 10 Taskbar Widgets. It was introduced with Windows Vista, in which it features ...

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 ...

. Sidebar in turn was called

Windows Desktop Gadgets Windows Desktop Gadgets (called Windows Sidebar in Windows Vista) is a discontinued widget engine for Microsoft Gadgets. Desktop Gadgets have been replaced by Windows 10 Taskbar Widgets. It was introduced with Windows Vista, in which it features ...

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 nearly ...

, which also allows components to be added to the desktop, but it was also discontinued due to security issues;

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...

replaced it with live tiles in the Start screen, which were replaced with Widgets in

Windows 11 Windows 11 is the latest major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, released in October 2021. It is a free upgrade to its predecessor, Windows 10 (2015), and is available for any Windows 10 devices that meet the new Windows 11 ...

. Windows Server 2003 R2 32-bit is the most recent Microsoft operating system to support Active Desktop. It appears that the 64-bit version of Windows XP no longer supports Active Desktop. However, it still provides the option to display Web pages and channels built with Microsoft's

Channel Definition Format Channel Definition Format (CDF) was an XML file format formerly used in conjunction with Microsoft's Active Channel, Active Desktop and Smart Offline Favorites technologies. The format was designed to "offer frequently updated collections of info ...

(CDF) on the desktop. The HTML displaying capabilities are now mainly used for creating original wallpapers and adding search boxes to the desktop. For example, a user could copy the following code to display Wikipedia's search-box on the desktop:

References

External links

Internet Explorer 4.0 Desktop Gallery
(archived)

(archived) {{Internet Explorer Windows components Discontinued Windows components Push technology Windows 98

History

See also

References

External links