3 ms·

Windows 3.x by default had colourful (yellow) borders and white backgrounds (except maybe the "main container" window in MDI apps; was that perhaps gray? Or tea

Windows 3.x by default had colourful (yellow) borders and white backgrounds (except maybe the "main container" window in MDI apps; was that perhaps gray? Or teal?). The grey came with W95. Both were fully user-configurable via a quite user-friendly dialogue box, as were NT 3.x, NT4, and W2K. Can't recall whether XP, Vista, and 7 also allowed you to change colours directly -- if it was only the "Fisher-Price", "Glass", and, uh, "Glass 2?" that were locked-in in the standard UI setting -- or if you needed to switch to "Windows Classic", the 95--W2K-style UI, to change even the colours. Can't recall, because I of course switched to Classic first thing I did on any of those. That all went away with Windows 8, of course, and AFAIK didn't come back on 10 either. Actually, they'd started to sabotage it a little earlier: About halfway into the lifecycle of W7, you couldn't change the window border width in the dialogue any more; you needed to hack that value in the Registry (and re-hack it after any change via the dialogue box). And towards the very end, even that hack didn't do anything any more.

oblio 5y ago
XP for sure allowed you to change colors. The dialog wasn't even hidden, I think. 7 probably did, too, but the dialog was a bit hidden.
- causi 5y ago
  Not hidden at all. Right click anywhere on the desktop and hit "Personalize".
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    What we're talking about is probably not a secondary but at least tertiary or... Eh, fourth-level dialogue, buried at least three clicks deeper after that right-click. (Except in versions after Windows 7 it's nowhere to be found at all any more.)
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Yeah, it was probably either the dialogue before that, or (even more likely) a drop-down at the top of the dialogue that let you select "Classic". It's utterly incomprehensible to me why the went and just ripped all of that functionality out in later versions. (Also, why Linux desktop environments keep crowing about how many "themes" they have. However many thousands of them people cobble together... Just utterly pales in comparison to letting users set each detail of their systems up exactly as they want; that's in effect infinite "themes"!)

oblio 5y ago

XP for sure allowed you to change colors. The dialog wasn't even hidden, I think. 7 probably did, too, but the dialog was a bit hidden.

causi 5y ago
Not hidden at all. Right click anywhere on the desktop and hit "Personalize".
- CRConrad 5y ago
  What we're talking about is probably not a secondary but at least tertiary or... Eh, fourth-level dialogue, buried at least three clicks deeper after that right-click. (Except in versions after Windows 7 it's nowhere to be found at all any more.)
CRConrad 5y ago
Yeah, it was probably either the dialogue before that, or (even more likely) a drop-down at the top of the dialogue that let you select "Classic". It's utterly incomprehensible to me why the went and just ripped all of that functionality out in later versions. (Also, why Linux desktop environments keep crowing about how many "themes" they have. However many thousands of them people cobble together... Just utterly pales in comparison to letting users set each detail of their systems up exactly as they want; that's in effect infinite "themes"!)