Active Desktop was a feature of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Internet Explorer 4.0's optional Windows Desktop Update that allowed users to add

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

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 and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

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. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software ...

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

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

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) 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 as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

4.0 to 6.x, but not

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. HTML could be added both in place of the regular

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and as independent resizable desktop items. Items available online 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 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, also known as server Push, refers to a communication method, where the communication is initiated by a server rather than a client. This approach is different from the " pull" method where the communication is initiated by a clien ...

trend led by PointCast. Active Desktop allowed embedding a number of " channels" 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

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

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

s 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 Windows Desktop Update 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. Since

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 successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

, if a non-BMP image is used as

Windows Desktop The Windows shell is the graphical user interface for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Its readily identifiable elements consist of the desktop, the taskbar, the Start menu, the task switcher and the AutoPlay feature. On some versions of ...

wallpaper, Windows will convert non-BMP image to BMP image in background. Active Desktop never attained any significant degree of popularity, as its drawbacks included high use of system resources and reduced system stability. The component was retained in

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 ...

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. Sidebar in turn was called Windows Desktop Gadgets in

Windows 7 Windows 7 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 July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

, 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, made available for download via Microsoft ...

(also 8.1 and 10) partially replaced their functionality with " live tiles" in the Start screen (or Start menu). Finally, such functionalities have now been partially replaced with Widgets in

Windows 11 Windows 11 is a version of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, released on October 5, 2021, as the successor to Windows 10 (2015). It is available as a free upgrade for devices running Windows 10 that meet the #System requirements, Windo ...

. 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 (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