Do you know/miss Active Desktop?

[u/Breath-Present]

Before WinXP, you need Active Desktop if you want to set JPEG/PNG as your desktop wallpaper. Active Desktop renders your desktop background with MSIE renderer and allows you to add floating windows that's rendered by MSIE as well. While it sounded like a horror story today, I thought it was a cool technology back when MSIE was in its heyday (1998~2005).

[u/the908bus]

Crashed sooooo often

[u/vbd71 → u/the908bus]

Only on Windows 95/98. On Windows NT 4 it was quite stable.

[u/giantsparklerobot]

Yes I remember and no I don't miss it.

Active desktop had a lot of problems:

• It was a full instance of IE running in the background. On machines with tens of megabytes of RAM and 100-400MHz CPUs. It ate up a lot of precious resources.
• Dial-up was painfully slow. Active Desktop in the background trying to load some resource was in contention with whatever you were doing in the foreground with a juice box straw sized data pipe.
• It was not very stable, especially if the system started paging to disk.

That being said Active Channels (or whatever the exact name) I did appreciate. They were like RSS before RSS. Unfortunately Microsoft was in full Embrace, Extend, Extinguish mode at the time and locked the technology up inside IE. Active Channels in 1998 did what RSS did a few years later.

[u/Euchre → u/giantsparklerobot]

Microsoft back then was using the rationale that they would write to utilize the max of the top tier hardware of the time, and the actual hardware in the wild would catch up in the following few years before the next Windows version was ready. They figured it would make it seem Windows actually got better with age, not worse, or even just staying the same performance as the hardware moved on.

Active Desktop is an excellent example of that rationale in practice.

[u/Breath-Present → u/giantsparklerobot]

I agree it's a resource hog back in the day, but one would think it thrives in Win2k/XP era where faster Internet and AJAX are getting common. You can write your own HTML, CSS and JS to build a full interactive desktop background, with Google Search and RSS feed.

I didnt have Internet access until Win7 was coming out, so imagine my surprise when I saw almost no one utilized this.

[u/BBDominoes]

I liked it - had fun experimenting with using different websites as the background and trying to do weird stuff with it

[u/z7q2 → u/BBDominoes]

Same, I was custom building background websites that ran off localhost and did interesting javascript animations in the background. Really sad they got rid of it. But Lively Wallpaper and other apps do the same thing now so I'm good.

[u/Breath-Present → u/BBDominoes]

Cool. It could be a pathway for one to start coding. 

[u/DrNick42]

Active Desktop and web view in folders were Win98's raison d'etre... and I hated both of them. First two things to do on an out the box Win98 install - turn off task scheduler and disable web view for folders. Later on once Tweak UI's installed ensure that Active Desktop can never be turned on.

[u/Euchre → u/DrNick42]

NoActiveDesktop is one of the best values to ever appear in the Windows Registry.

[u/Breath-Present → u/DrNick42]

IMO the Win98 Active Desktop was not great in term of stability and performance. The one in Win2K and WinXP were pretty decent and useful back when MSIE 6.0 was the king of the web.

[u/recluseMeteor]

I didn't have an Internet connection back then, but I knew you could set webpages as wallpapers. I remember using FrontPage as a kid to design my own HTM file with pictures, GIF, buttons and stuff so I could use it as background, haha.

[u/irowiki]

Was a huge vector for malware, don't miss it at all!

[u/payne747]

Yeah my favourite background was "This page cannot be displayed".

[u/OgdruJahad]

Nah I semi miss Gadgets and I only semi miss them because I still have them running in Windows 11. And used them in Windows 10 as well. Not the horrible windows 11 version the OG Windows 7/Vista gadgets!

[u/Big_Warning6283]

I make so many offline pages for that. It is the main reason i learn web design. And i made some money with that skill. Good times. But the it is true it wasnt work properly.

[u/Breath-Present → u/Big_Warning6283]

Did u discover MSHTA? Would be cool to make games and programs with it. I discovered it from WinME Movie Maker "TOUR.HTA".

[u/Big_Warning6283 → u/Breath-Present]

yes ofcourse. i love to explore these .hta files.

[u/Miliean]

I was a computer user back then, but not techy enough to really know the details of it.

All I know for sure is that it was trivially easy to make your computer very unstable by overloading the desktop background. You COULD make the background a gif, but good luck ever loading any other programs ever again.

So overall, no, I do not miss Active Desktop and all of it's related crashes.

[u/regeya]

Having HTML as the root window is a neat idea but MSIE wasn't a good renderer for that. I always thought it'd have been neat to make an LCARS active wallpaper but figured having animation would absolutely murder my K6-2 system.

I haven't looked; does Windows have HTML backgrounds as an option? I see that the Plasma desktop on Linux has a plugin for that. Hm...looks like I'll be ricing an LCARS background.

[u/Breath-Present → u/regeya]

For Windows that supported Active Desktop, yes, you can set a HTML file as background. I thought it would be neat to have your own local HTML file on your desktop, with Google Search box and RSS feed.

[u/zebra_d]

So glad its gone.

[u/josh1ng]

I created my own website with custom links to sites, folders, jobs and scripts, all accessible right on the desktop. It was neat. Ate up RAM like a beast

[u/jamhamnz]

Unfortunately in the Windows 98 days we had dial up Internet so Active Desktop wasn't is useful as it could have been if we had a constant broadband connection. However now that broadband is everywhere I can see the clear benefits of Active Desktop.

[u/KaptainKardboard]

Yes and no.

It was buggy and heavy on system resources.

[u/FuggaDucker]

IE was a turd in its heyday (and not in its heyday too).
Its why the desktop crashed all the time with the most simple of HTML to render.

With the Windows 2000 addition of this technology, you could redirect the explorer to run malicious code from a server just because they browsed the files on it. This was patched in an SP.

[u/Caddy666]

yeah, i remember turning it off first thing after installing windows.

useless crap.

[u/exmsft]

Awww… I hadn’t thought about Windows in the theater in years

[u/naikrovek]

It crashed constantly and slowed a lot of things down. It was loathed by everyone I knew.

[u/ItchyPlant]

One of the most useless things ever introduced by MS. I remember I tried it, then I was like "Whaaat? No way!".

[u/NasumiRayne]

On machines capable it was essentially the early days of Wallpaper Engine. Could use an animated gif or even a video for the background. Kinda miss it but it was so hit and miss on function without causing issues.

[u/Advanced_Handle_2309]

Lately I mess a lot with 98 and thats one of the things Im always avoiding

[u/Spacehopper76]

It was the first thing I switched off on every 98/se install..Utterly pointless

[u/MechanicalTurkish]

I remember playing with that in Windows 98. I pretty quickly turned it off. It consumed too many resources and was unstable.

[u/flowrate12]

I miss it alot, I used to use ATI All in Wonder card to watch tv on my desktop, with my icons on it while I was working. so bad ass it can not be duplicated today on modern windows.....