WallpaperEx

With all the aspects that the latest Windows version has improved upon, setting live wallpapers or web content as your desktop background does not seem to be on the horizon for Microsoft. Luckily, thanks to the open-source community, you do not have to wait in order to achieve this type of functionality.

Whether you want to stay up-to-date with the latest news, use a dedicated weather provider service, view motivational quotes to brighten your day or give a splash of life via colorful animations, WallpaperEx has the right tools you need for setting a website with any of the aforementioned features as your background, to view important info at a glance.

Thanks to its portable nature, you can add the program to your current on-the-go USB flash drive-powered setup to avoid having to manually configure its settings on the various computers you work with.

Double-clicking its executable file greets the user to a minimalist interface where they can input the website’s address and set it directly, without the hassle of navigating through overly complex interfaces and menus. After applying it, the app stays neatly tucked in with the rest of the system tray icons to avoid unnecessarily cluttering your taskbar.

The website remains applied as long as the application is running, which makes it easy for users to simply close it whenever they want to revert to their default wallpaper without jumping through extra hoops to do so.

While the app does have some degree of support for multi-monitor setups, the website wallpaper does not seem to work on more than two at once, which puts triple monitor setups at a disadvantage.

Moreover, despite the program’s small file size, its memory footprint can rise up to over one gigabyte of RAM, depending on the live elements that fill the webpage, from animations to videos, thus putting users with low-powered computers at a disadvantage.

Finally, while implementing some form of interaction with the website itself is undoubtedly a complex task, the lack of such a function means that certain websites such as YouTube with automatic cookie pop-ups may not work as intended since you cannot agree to them in order to access the video in question.

If you ever wanted to liven your background and set GIF animations or looping videos as wallpaper, and you want to avoid expensive and clunky proprietary software that may also compromise your privacy, then WallpaperEx’s open-source offering and straightforward usage experience can be of great use to you.