There are some things that are better than the HTML gadget, and some things that are worse. So, depending on which content your pulling into your portal, one or the other will be a better choice.

Feature list:

• Built in HTTP proxy (all communication goes directly between the client and gadget)
• HTTP Timeouts (slow origin servers won't make the portal unresponsive)
• HTTP 1.1 Client. Uses persistent HTTP connections to decrease the load on both the portal and origin server
• Allows XSLT parsing of XHTML compliant pages.
• Sends X-Forward-For headers to origin servers, preserving the IP address trail of the browser
• Better support for POST method consistency between client -> gadget -> origin server (things like HTML form uploads are more likely to work)
• A customizable URL Rewriter engine based on Regular Expression pattern matching
• Very verbose debugging info including showing fetch statistics alongside the content views.
• Back button built into the gadget title bar