LEGACY NOTE · PERIOD DOCUMENT, 2007

Sidebar gadgets and the galleries that held them, 2007

A February 2007 note about two new WinCustomize galleries is now a record of a whole distribution model for small desktop software — and of what happened to the things people uploaded to it.

Published 2026-08-06 · Updated — · 2,210 words · 16 sources · Status of facts checked 2026-08-06

The record that stood at this address is dated Monday, 2007-02-12 at 11:50. It was a submission to a social bookmarking community, and it announced that WinCustomize had opened two new galleries: one for Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets, one for Sidebar Styler. It carried eight tags, a vote count of 14, two outbound links and a pointer to the forum thread on thevistaforums.com it was taken from. The two outbound links went to www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?libid=63 and www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?libid=66.⁷

Nineteen years later those two identifiers are the most useful thing on the page, because they still resolve. On 2026-08-06 each answered an automated request with HTTP 301: libid=63 to wincustomize.com/explore/sidebar_gadgets, libid=66 to wincustomize.com/explore/sidebar_styler, and both destinations returned 200.^a One of them names a gallery whose newest listing is dated 2013-03-05 and whose oldest is dated 2007-02-01; the other names a gallery whose newest listing is dated 2009-10-30. What stopped was not the host and not the files. What stopped was the platform underneath them, on three dates Microsoft published itself.

What a gadget was, as a file

A Windows Sidebar gadget was a small HTML application. Microsoft’s own developer documentation describes the package plainly: a gadget could be deployed as a ZIP file, as a Windows cabinet (CAB) file, or as a Windows Installer .msi, and both CAB and ZIP packages had to carry the .gadget extension so that Windows Sidebar would open the package when a user downloaded or double-clicked it.³ Inside, a manifest is mandatory and the documentation states it must be named gadget.xml.⁴ The manifest declares a name, a version, and a <host name="sidebar"> block whose <base> element gives type="HTML" and the source file Sidebar loads.⁴

One required element in that manifest is <permissions>. Microsoft’s documentation gives its expected value as Full and lists no alternative value.⁴ That is the whole security model of the format stated in a single line of XML, and it is why the ending, when it came, was total rather than partial.

Two properties follow from the packaging, and they pull in opposite directions. A gadget was a file — a self-contained archive its author could keep, copy, hand to someone else and post anywhere. That is more than a bookmark record inside a service ever was. But a gadget was also a file that only one runtime could execute, and that runtime is documented for three versions of Windows and no others: Microsoft’s documentation states the Windows Gadget Platform and Sidebar are available for use in Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.³ Microsoft’s lifecycle record lists Windows Vista with a start date of 2007-01-25 and an extended end date of 2017-04-12.^13c

The galleries were the distribution model

Distribution for this class of software ran through galleries: a host site accepted uploads, held the files, categorised them, offered sorting by downloads, rating and date, and gave each item a page with comments. Microsoft ran one, the Windows Live Gallery. Third parties ran the rest, WinCustomize — a Stardock Corporation site — among them.⁸

The 2007 capture of the first of the two announced galleries shows how wide the category was before it narrowed. Its gallery navigation lists, side by side, DesktopX Objects, DesktopX Widgets, Google Gadgets, Kapsules, Sidebar Gadgets and Widgets for SkinStudio — six separate targets for small desktop panels, catalogued by one host as siblings.⁸ The Sidebar Gadgets section alone was subdivided into General, Weather, Calendar, Stock Tickers, Mail Checkers, Meters and RSS Feeds.⁸ The taxonomy is the host’s, not the format’s: what a visitor could find, and how, was set by whoever ran the catalogue.

The dates line up with the announcement in a way that can be checked independently of it. On 2026-08-06 the oldest item listed in WinCustomize’s Sidebar Gadgets gallery is dated 2007-02-01, and the oldest in its Sidebar Styler gallery is dated 2007-02-11.⁹¹⁰ The record at this address is dated 2007-02-12: eleven days after the oldest surviving item in the gadget gallery, one day after the oldest in the styler gallery. A note calling both galleries new on that date is consistent with what the two listings still show.

Three dated endings

October 2011 — the first-party gallery closes. The Windows Live Gallery was retired. The Next Web reported it on 2011-10-03 and quoted the notice left in its place, which stated that Microsoft was no longer supporting development or uploading of new gadgets and pointed readers to the gadgets page of the Windows Personalization Gallery.⁵ Wikipedia, cited here as a secondary source, gives the retirement date as 2011-10-01.¹⁴ The Internet Archive’s capture index agrees with the window: captures of gallery.live.com return status 200 through 2011-09-29 and status 302 from 2011-10-04 onward.⁶

2012-07-10 — the platform is declared unsafe. Microsoft published Security Advisory 2719662, “Vulnerabilities in Gadgets Could Allow Remote Code Execution”, announcing an automated Fix it solution that disables Windows Sidebar and Gadgets on supported editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.¹ The advisory states that applying it disables the Windows Sidebar experience and all gadget functionality, and it names two separate routes to code execution: a legitimate gadget containing a vulnerability, and a malicious gadget a user is tricked into installing.¹ Its revision history records version 1.0 on 2012-07-10 and version 1.1 on 2013-07-03, the latter recorded as an informational change only.¹ The advisory is a switch, not a patch: no fix to the format was shipped with it, and the category was closed.

2012-10-30 — the runtime leaves the operating system. Microsoft’s lifecycle record lists that date as the start of Windows 8.¹⁶ Its Windows 8 compatibility documentation states that gadgets were removed from the operating system entirely, that vulnerabilities exist such that even benign gadgets could be exploited, and — the sentence that matters most to anyone who had a shelf of them — that “Windows 7 users with Gadgets on their Desktop will be notified and Gadgets will be uninstalled.”² The same page notes that the gadget API and folder structure remained in Windows 8, so software that installed gadgets programmatically kept running while the gadgets themselves did not.² An upgrade removed the user’s collection from the user’s own machine.

What is still standing, checked 2026-08-06

Both galleries answer. The Sidebar Gadgets gallery displays “Page 1 of 11”, its newest listing dated 2013-03-05 and its oldest 2007-02-01; the Sidebar Styler gallery displays “Page 1 of 6”, newest listing 2009-10-30, oldest 2007-02-11.⁹¹⁰ Neither listing shows an item newer than those dates. On the same host, a Desktop Gadgets gallery displays “Page 1 of 65” with a newest listing dated 2026-08-04, so the host is not dormant — two of its rooms are.¹¹

The files are still there. One item in the Sidebar Gadgets gallery, listed as updated 2007-02-15 and titled Gadget Spacer, has a working download endpoint; on 2026-08-06 it answered with a ZIP wrapper containing one file of 73,839 bytes named GadgetSpacer.gadget.¹² That file is a Microsoft Cabinet archive. Its directory lists nine files — gadget.xml, gadget.html, gadget.js, gadget.css, Settings.html and four PNGs — which is the structure Microsoft’s documentation describes.³⁴ The ZIP directory entry for the package records 2007-02-12 20:34:58, the same calendar day as the announcement at this address; the nine entries inside the cabinet record 2007-02-12 20:31:16. Two requests returned identical bytes, SHA-256 5a30086437c0ea9aabffb24e7008c1302af1113053d990b2a3677db0a789cea3.^b

So the artefact survived and the machinery did not. Nothing on this page is an instruction to install or run a gadget: Microsoft’s 2012-07-10 advisory stands unretracted, the runtime it describes left Windows with the 2012 release, and the only claims made here concern what a file is and where it sits.¹²

The rule this address is evidence for

A catalogue is not a copy. That is the same failure the bookmarking half of this publication records, one layer up: a bookmark is a pointer to someone else’s page, and a gallery listing is a pointer to someone else’s file. When a service holding pointers closes, the pointers go. What the gadget galleries add is the second half of the lesson, which the bookmarking story cannot show, because here the files did survive.

Stated as a rule tied to a requirement: a body of work that must stay findable after its platform is withdrawn needs an index its author controls, because the host’s index has the host’s lifespan and its URL scheme has the host’s release cycle. A body of work that must stay usable needs something harder — a runtime that outlives the vendor, or a format an ordinary tool can read. The gadget survives the second test only in the weak sense: a .gadget package is a ZIP or a CAB, and an ordinary archive tool opens either, so its manifest, its markup and its scripts remain legible as text. What no longer exists is anything that will run it.

The distinction is worth holding onto because it is usually collapsed. “Do you have a copy” and “can you still open it” are separate questions, and a format answers only the second, and only if the format is documented. Microsoft’s gadget documentation is still published, in the archived previous-versions set on Microsoft Learn, which is the single reason the paragraphs above could be written from the specification rather than from guesswork.³⁴

What replaced the behaviour

Windows 11 has widgets, and the shape of the thing has changed completely. Microsoft’s current developer documentation describes a Windows widget as a small UI container whose text and graphics are supplied by a Windows app or a Progressive Web App: the developer implements a widget provider that responds to requests from the Widgets host and returns JSON specifying both the visual template, in Adaptive Cards format, and its data. A provider can currently be implemented in a packaged Win32 desktop app or a PWA.¹⁵

Read that against gadget.xml and the change is structural rather than cosmetic. In 2007 the unit of distribution was a file, uploaded by its author to whichever gallery would take it, and the security boundary was a manifest element whose documented value was Full. In 2026 the unit is an installed application that answers a query, the content is data rather than executable markup, and there is no gallery to upload to because there is nothing standalone to upload. The trade is legible: the 2012 advisory would have nothing to describe under the current design, and neither would this article.

References

1. Microsoft. “Microsoft Security Advisory 2719662: Vulnerabilities in Gadgets Could Allow Remote Code Execution.” Microsoft Learn, 2012-07-10 (version 1.1, 2013-07-03). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/SecurityAdvisories/2013/2719662 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
2. Microsoft. “Desktop gadgets removed.” Microsoft Learn, Windows 8 compatibility cookbook, 2020-09-01. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/w8cookbook/desktop-gadgets-removed — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
3. Microsoft. “Gadgets for Windows Sidebar Packaging, Updating, and Refreshing.” Microsoft Learn, 2018-05-31. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/sidebar/-sidebar-overview-updating — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
4. Microsoft. “Gadgets for Windows Sidebar Manifest.” Microsoft Learn, 2018-05-31. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/sidebar/-sidebar-gadget-manifest — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
5. Brian, Matt. “Microsoft retires Windows Live Gallery to focus on Windows 8 apps.” The Next Web, 2011-10-03. https://thenextweb.com/news/microsoft-retires-windows-live-gallery-to-focus-on-windows-8-apps — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
6. Internet Archive. “Wayback CDX Server query for gallery.live.com, 2011–2012.” Wayback Machine, n.d. https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=gallery.live.com&output=text&fl=timestamp,statuscode&from=2011&to=2012 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
7. Internet Archive. “Vista Sidebar Gadgets and Sidebar Styler galleries.” Wayback Machine capture of infopirate.org, 2008-04-13. https://web.archive.org/web/20080413095048/http://infopirate.org/vista-sidebar-gadgets-and-sidebar-styler-galleries — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
8. Internet Archive. “WinCustomize: Sidebar Gadgets Gallery.” Wayback Machine capture of www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?libid=63, 2007-09-28. https://web.archive.org/web/20070928024948/http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?libid=63 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
9. WinCustomize. “Sidebar Gadgets.” WinCustomize gallery listing, n.d. https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/sidebar_gadgets — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
10. WinCustomize. “Sidebar Styler.” WinCustomize gallery listing, n.d. https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/sidebar_styler — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
11. WinCustomize. “Desktop Gadgets.” WinCustomize gallery listing, n.d. https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/desktop_gadgets — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
12. WinCustomize. “Sidebar Gadgets — Gadget Spacer.” WinCustomize item page, 2007-02-15. https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/sidebar_gadgets/10 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
13. Microsoft. “Windows Vista — Microsoft Lifecycle.” Microsoft Learn, 2022-11-02. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-vista — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
14. Wikipedia contributors. “Windows Desktop Gadgets.” Wikipedia, last edited 2026-06-17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Desktop_Gadgets — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
15. Microsoft. “Widget providers.” Microsoft Learn, 2026-07-07. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/widgets/widget-providers — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
16. Microsoft. “Windows 8 — Microsoft Lifecycle.” Microsoft Learn, 2022-11-02. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-8 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩

Notes

1. The status codes are what an automated request received on 2026-08-06 and are not evidence about the intervening nineteen years: no capture record was assembled here to test whether the two 2007 addresses resolved continuously. The redirect targets were requested separately and each returned 200.
2. The checksum is given so the statement can be tested rather than taken on trust: it is the SHA-256 of the single file contained in the response, not of the response itself, and two requests on 2026-08-06 produced identical bytes. A host is free to re-encode its archives at any time, in which case the figure will stop matching and this note will be the record of what it was.
3. Microsoft’s lifecycle listing gives Windows Vista a start date of 2007-01-25, which is the lifecycle record’s own date and not the consumer availability date commonly cited for the release.

From early 2007 this address ran a Drupal-based social bookmarking community whose users submitted links with tags, notes and votes alongside a stream of Windows troubleshooting questions; the record at this path, dated 2007-02-12, was one of those submissions. Seven Wayback captures of this exact path survive, from 2008-04-13 to 2009-04-02, and stop there; later captures of the domain degrade, and by 2012–2013 the site had been abandoned, scraped or repurposed. wincustomize.com — whose galleries the 2007 record announced — still points back at this address (checked 2026-08-06).