Yahoo widgets was infinitely better than OSx widgets, but many widgets for mac have gone by the wayside, perhaps the whole app things has destroyed the idea of widgets and many Geeklets give a better use. However it always wins out over mac osx widgets in that you can show them all on the desktop and they are often more controllable.
Amnesty helps with displaying osx widgets but it is a bit creaky these days, and i started to use some of these yahoo widegets again and had forgotten how good they were.

My favorite Yahoo Widget was the Daily Planner, which would show you what's in iCal for today and tomorrow. But it hasn't worked since Leopard. (The Dashboard widget iCal Events can be moved to the desktop, but dashboard widgets always float above everything and won't go into the background.) Yahoo support has been stalling for three months. Today they suggested updating the Widget Engine to version 4.5.2, which, unfortunately, doesn't exist.

The last few updates seem to have fixed most of the major problems I mentioned in my review of version 4.0. YWE will periodically crash (widgets are still running, but the menu item + dock are gone), but I haven't experienced contextual menu or problems with Yahoo's own widgets crashing in awhile.
The design quibbles with 4.x that I described previously are still there, though. I don't expect them to change in a minor point release, so hopefully version 5.x will address some of those.

Version 4 has some great new features but has been almost nothing but bugs for me. The idea of a dock with mini-states is great, as is the idea of browsing/installing widgets entirely within YWE.

My biggest problem with YWE 4 is that most of the widgets I've tried, including Yahoo's official set, either won't launch or will crash when I actually try to use them. On a similar note, widget-specific items will randomly stop showing up in the context menu, making it impossible, for instance, to change my location in Yahoo's weather widget. Clearing out all of my preferences and support files, then re-launching YWE doesn't help.

There's also a few small but strange design choices in YWE 4 as well. The developers changed the drop-down menu for widget display modes to something that's less intuitive when you're trying to just show a widget in the Heads Up display.

There are also some options that for some reason weren't included, most notably the ability to only show the dock in the Heads Up Display. It can either be completely closed or open with some portion showing at all times along one edge of the screen (including when it's collapsed).

And this is more of a suggestion than a complaint, but it would be great if there was a way to minimize a widget to the dock so that only the mini-state was visible. Yahoo's weather widget, for instance, would display the current weather in the dock, but the extended forecast wouldn't be visible.

I'm switching back to 3.x (which I'd give 4 stars) until they work out the bugs. 4.x has the potential to be a 5-star app, but the bugs and a few smaller design quirks that I and many others (see the official forums) have experienced hold it back.

Works ok on my iMac under 10.3.9 but the calendar widget now only pulls in my main iCal calendar and not all my subscribed to calendars too. So I feel lost. The previous calendar widget worked great. I've also had a few widgets crash. Sad.

Is a version planned for OS X 10.5?

With this update, IMPOSSIBLE to open all my non-official Yahoo widgets! The worst you can download the old ones in the widget section but you cannot open them.

Yahoo probably think that mac users are chinese dissidentscmore control for less freedom.

Time to boycott. :()