Active Desktop - put as many websites as you can stand on your desktop.

To create a custom toolbar, rightclick task bar, click toolbars, click New Toolbar and then browse to the folder which contains the shortcuts you want.

2. From http://www.netjaxer.com: “Netjaxer is an easy way to integrate your favorite web apps into Windows.
Create a desktop or quick launch icon. Load any web page when Windows starts and run it as a tray icon.”

From what I read, you can do all of that with shortcuts, with the exception of the system tray icon. Desktop or quicklaunch shortcuts are easy. Startup is not much harder (put shortcut to the app in the %user%\start menu\startup folder.)

3. I would like to see one that sits in a toolbar that gives live rss links like what firefox does in the bookmark menu, but in my toolbar. I.e. you click the folder (feed) and it lists links (articles). Or an aggregator that lives in the system tray, though this is probably available.

Bottom line is that netjaxer is not innovative or even original beyond the ability to put a shortcut in the system tray. Which is not even useful since the same functionality is in the quick launch or custom toolbars.

You can only drag URLs onto the Quick Launch bar part of the taskbar. To turn it on, right click on the taskbar, and select it from the Toolbars menu flyout. It should appear to the right of your Start button, and it probably will already have a few application shortcuts. You can drag urls onto the quick launch bar area directly to create a shortcut. You can also
right click on the quick launch area and select Open Folder. You could then create a folder of URL shortcuts that would appear as a folder flyout thingee in your quick launch bar.

As for Active Desktop, it’s still there in XP, hidden away. Right click on the Desktop –> Properties –> Desktop tab –> Customise Desktop… –> Web tab.

At my XP machine at the office on Thursday, I verified that you can drag URL’s to the desktop… a no-brainer. But I couldn’t drag URL’s to the system tray at all, and it wasn’t obvious how you might do that. I’m not sure what the Quick Launch toolbar is, but perhaps it’s too well hidden. In any case, the inability to simpy drag web pages into your system tray makes it far inferior to the Mac OS X dock. I don’t think you can easily add file folders to the system tray, either. (Correct me if I’m wrong on that… I couldn’t do it.)

Re: #5, this sounds like another hidden feature that simply shouldn’t be. In modern browsers, you don’t have to “turn on” this capability… it just is. And you aren’t restricted to one particular folder…. you can do this with any folder you like. Again, this is an obvious shortcoming in IE that you only become aware of when you crawl out of the hole Microsoft has dug for you.

Re: #6, as I recall, you had to turn on Active Desktop, in which case your whole interface became like a web browser. I haven’t used Windows enough since Windows 95 and NT 4.0 to know if that feature survived to XP. If it did, it’s so well hidden that most Windows users apparently don’t know how to do it.

Microsoft excels at making simple tasks difficult and building interface complexity where simplicity is best. Perhaps NetJaxer simply “turns on” existing features and makes simple things that Microsoft has made hard. In any case, it’s obvious to a Mac user that Windows is way behind the times in enabling this kind of functionality for its users.

1. and 2. can be done with the Quick Launch toolbar.

3. You can drag URLs directly to the desktop and access them from there.

4. Sure, Windows doesn’t have dashboard widgets. There is software like Yahoo! Widgets that currently provides widget functionality on Windows.

5. You can do this in Internet Explorer. Bookmarks placed in the Links bookmarks folder will get displayed in the Links toolbar you can turn on.

6. This has been supported in Windows since IE 4 with Active Desktop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop).