Widgets have become an element that gains weight over the years in operating system interfaces, which in turn is inextricably linked to growing user demand. It is true that their implementations have not always been the most convenient (just remember the right bar of Windows Vista, right?), but in general it is a very interesting proposal that allows us to concentrate the information that most of us are interested in in a certain space.

This results in companies responsible for operating systems actively work to find possible improvements for themwhether they appear anywhere in the system interface, as in Android and iOS, or are limited exclusively to a certain area, as in the case of Windows 11. Something that, I confess, I do not understand, because it ends up forcing the user to access the widget panel instead of could have said information right on the desktop.

And this may seem like an insignificant detail, but it actually has an important consequence, and this is it we may miss updating the content of one of them or at best take a few minutes to come up with something we could know almost immediately if these plugins could be placed directly on the desktop or better yet if they could be set to always appear on the screen above windows that are open at that time.

The good news is that Microsoft has acknowledged this problem and although they will continue to place widgets exclusively in their own panel, as we can read in The Verge Windows 11 has started receiving an update that allows widgets to generate notifications. “When something important happens related to one of your widgets, you may see an ad for that widget in your taskbar” explains Microsoft in a support article. “These ads are meant to be quick and visible, and if you don’t interact with them, your dashboard will revert to showing the weather“.

This news comes from the hands of the Windows Web Experience Pack update, which is already available to some users and will continue to expand during this week. The bad part, according to early evidence, is that Windows 11 It doesn’t seem to offer users the ability to choose which widgets can generate notifications and which can’t. However, we can only hope that it will be possible in the near future.