> I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.
I agree almost, but not quite 100% with that. My tiny disagreement: The decline set in a bit earlier, not after but some time in the W7 era: Up until some point you could set window border width to 0 in the Appearance control panel applet; after that this input field was apparently made read-only for the user. For a while after that you could "hack" that by editing a Registry value, but AFAICR they disabled that, too. (Or rather, if not exactly disabled Registry editing, made the display driver ignore it.)
I agree almost, but not quite 100% with that. My tiny disagreement: The decline set in a bit earlier, not after but some time in the W7 era: Up until some point you could set window border width to 0 in the Appearance control panel applet; after that this input field was apparently made read-only for the user. For a while after that you could "hack" that by editing a Registry value, but AFAICR they disabled that, too. (Or rather, if not exactly disabled Registry editing, made the display driver ignore it.)