Back in Black! Or rather, back OUT black!
Just a quick blog post to update you on an issue near and dear to the hearts of some people. Well, at least the 1300 or so people so far who have contacted me about this issue.
Background
In Vista, we are really trying to reduce the amount of high contrast visual noise in the UI to make it more comfortable for daily use. Part of that is make the taskbar darker, and another aspect is making the maximized windows match the taskbar by tinting toward black also. The black taskbar and black titlebar produce a kind of letter-boxed effect, drawing your eyes toward the contents. We think it works pretty well. What we do is mix black in with the selected window color. If you look closely, you can see that your taskbar and maximized titlebars all have some of your window color mixed in.
The Complaints
Now, we have had a number of complaints from users on this one. It seems that people who bother to change their window color using the cool new Appearance control panel are not happy when their red or blue windows turn black. Of course, for any change we make there are a whole bunch of people who hate it. With 300 million users, even 1/10th of 1% of people don't like something, and only 1% of those REALLY don't like it, that is still thousands of people who will email us daily, blog about it, tell their friends, etc. The trick of working in Windows is to have a thick skin while still remaining sensitive to potentially serious issues.
For this issue, we talked about it internally for quite a while. Were people just reacting to the change? Would they get used to it over time and even grow to appreciate it? Or would it be one of those little annoying things that bugs people a little bit every day? We even considered whether or not this should be a choice for the user. Was it worth adding more UI to the system? And of course as time went on, the ability to make any change at all was going down by the day.
The Fix
In the end, we decided that we like the black and think it is the right thing to do, but we want to respect the user's color choice for users who bother to make a change. So - starting in today's build, we have significantly backed off the amount of black that is mixed in with the user's color for maximized windows. This is not particularly noticeable with the default color, but with the more intense colors like Red and Orange, you will appreciate the difference.
So - cheers for everyone who didn't like the black windows! And for those who want the darkness, just change your window color to something more black.