Apple Confirms Dashboard is Going Away After 14 Years

Apple has removed Dashboard support from WebKit, not long after it was discovered that the feature has been completely dropped in macOS Catalina, according to a changelog spotted by Japanese blog Mac Otakara.

While this news is not entirely surprising, it eliminates any slim hope that Dashboard might have returned in a future beta of macOS Catalina. The feature has already been disabled by default since OS X Yosemite, but it can still be manually enabled within Mission Control in System Preferences as of macOS Mojave.

Dashboard, first introduced in OS X Tiger in 2005, was effectively a secondary desktop on the Mac that housed a variety of customizable widgets, ranging from sticky notes and the weather forecast to a clock and a calculator. These ‌widgets‌ have relied on Safari's open source WebKit engine for rendering.

Dashboard appears to remain functional in macOS Mojave for now, although it is clearly a legacy feature and some ‌widgets‌ do not work. After over 14 years, the feature is about to ride off into the sunset for good.