Every time someone asks this question, I always answer
Fully customizable including background colors. I have boxes with my often-used links (about 20 of them including this board), rss links to top 15 stories in NY Times, Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, CNN, Time, Wired, plus Rotten Tomatoes, and a few others. I have a calendar, a digital clock, a list of my top stocks with updating prices, a widget with phases of the moon. The free version has an ad banner at the top, but if you scroll down a bit, you can hide it. You can also have multiple tabs. There’s nothing visible on the page that you don’t put there.
I change the colors to match whatever wallpaper I’m currently using, as I don’t like my active windows filling the whole screen.