The modestly popular Konfabulator widget application for Windows and Mac (review) was snatched up by Yahoo in late July, and the company promptly turned around and started giving it away for free. We knew that Yahoo was going to use it to promote some of their web services, and they've delivered on that promise now that the application has graduated to version 3.0. And with its first big release in the Yahoo ownership era, it has received a new, Yahoorific name: Yahoo! Widget Engine.

For the uninitiated, Konf^h^h^h^h Yahoo Widget Engine manages little programs called "widgets" that perform simple tasks like checking your e-mail, showing your system resource usage, providing weather forecasts, and more. YWE is a useful program, provided the following: plenty of spare RAM screen real estate to spare. The biggest complaint about this little widget monster has been its appetite for RAM, so I was interested to see if Yahoo had worked any magic on the application. Surely they'd want to make it more system friendly in order to spur adoption.

With four widgets running under 2.01, I have 42MB in use, but with 3.0 that jumps up to 53MB, an increase of 11MB. This is the opposite of what should have happened, and it certainly won't help YWE's reputation amongst PC enthusiasts. So what's the big justification for 3.0? More self-promotion.

The company has rolled out nine new widgets, more than half of which tie in to Yahoo services. For instance, the picture frame can now pull pictures from Flickr or Yahoo Photos, and a new notepad applet allows you to keep notes saved on a central server. Unfortunately, the widget gallery is still a morass of confusing, undifferentiated applets that's painful to navigate. Even worse, links to widgets off of their front page result in 404 errors.

YWE brings some other annoyances too. The default install not only attempts to set your default search engine and web page to Yahoo's offerings (which is par for the course), but the application also wants to install Yahoo! Central, which monitors those settings and tries to keep them in place. A minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. More irritating, some of my third-party apps now "steal focus" when they update. For example, my RSS reader pulls itself to the foreground whenever it updates, and there's no reason for it to do so.

I get the feeling that YWE has been released before it is ready, and it is somewhat disheartening to see that Yahoo's self-promotional interests have been addressed twofold, while other things languish. The company will have to take some major leaps forward in the near future, however. Windows Vista will have integrated support for Microsoft's own widgets, and Google's Sidebar is already picking up steam (although the latter is a resource hog as well, eating up 145MB of RAM on my system).

Yahoo Widget Engine is available for Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.3 (or higher).