Yahoo Widgets 4 is now available for download. The new version makes significant performance improvements over earlier releases. They have also finally provided a built in method of updating widgets, as well as discovering new ones – something I’ve been keenly looking forward to, since I had to implement my own update listener for a set of widgets I wrote last year.

Also new in this verison is the Widget Dock, which is very similar to the Google and Vista Dock bars, basically allowing you to manage and neatly organise widgets on the desktop. I also like the new Flickr widget which is bundled with version 4. The widget not only streams photos from Flickr directly to your desktop it also provides drag and drop upload capability so you put your photos onto Flickr with relative ease.

From a development point theyve made massive performance improvements with DOM traversal of XML and XPath seems substantially faster against large XML DOM’s – which is something I used to whinge about a lot. You can view a list of all the changes in the versions release notes.

All in all, its not bad!