Widgets on the Mac are officially dead.
Apple dropped support for Dashboard on the Mac in the first beta of macOS Catalina without saying a word. Now it looks like there’s no hope of it coming back according to a recent changelog.
Macotakara noticed that Apple removed WebKit support for Dashboard in a recent update. The feature has been disabled by default since macOS Yosemite, but there was some hope among Mac users that it could make a comeback.
Dashboard made its debut on the Mac as part of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005. The feature allowed allowed mini-applications known as widgets to run on a secondary desktop. The idea was that the smaller applications would take longer to launch. They were great for short tasks like checking the weather, stock prices or sports scores but kind of fell out of use by the Mac community in general over the last five years.
Once Macs are upgraded to macOS Catalina this fall there will likely be no way to get widgets on your Mac. However, if you really love your widgets, they can be manually enabled within Mission Control in System Preferences as of macOS Mojave, you’ll just have to never upgrade your macOS again.
