The widget manager at http://widget.mibbit.com/manager/ has been updated with the latest prefs system. So you’ll see previews for many chat elements, color picker, skins – all the same extras as in the main client :)
<tech bit>
Stability should be ok for now, the root cause has been traced to the Java DNS lookup system, which is just really bad. Download the source from sun and take a look :/ The result of dns lookups can sometimes be wrong, and can also crash the JVM with a segfault. Not good.
We had issues with the Java DNS lookup system when we used it for reverse queries, so I wrote a DNS client from scratch to deal with this. I’m now just modifying that to be able to handle forward queries / recursive lookups etc, then we will be rid of the Java DNS lookups entirely, and rid of the bugs/issues that come with using it sometimes. The replacement should be ready this week or early next.