Microsoft has apparently received a lot of complaints from users who receive black borders on their windows when they maximize them. You may not think this is that big of a deal but for those people who choose colors like red or orange you can drastically notice the window color change, for example from red to black, when you maximize it. Microsoft originally did this because when you maximize a window you are trying to focus on the contents and a black border makes that easier to do.
Users didn’t like that though so Microsoft decided to compromise a little bit. Now the window borders will take on more color depending on the Aero color choice that you make. The image above is from the blue theme that I chose for the sake of the example, otherwise I personally like the Graphite one.
Here is why Microsoft gave in and made the change:
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.
…
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.
Yesterday, on that same blog, the team was also answering some of the most frequently asked questions about the Windows Vista Basic theme. They answered almost every question that I have asked myself at one time or another:
- Why isn’t the Close button oversized compared to the Minimize and Maximize buttons, like in Aero?
- Then how is the DWM getting away with it?
- Why didn’t you change the legacy window manager then?
- Why aren’t the caption buttons bigger in Aero Basic?
- What if I don’t like them this small?
- What’s with the extra border?
- But I’m running Aero Basic not Aero so I don’t have glass, so why put a thick “glass” border there?
- What if I don’t like it?
- Why does Aero have a solid 1-pixel black border inside the frame, and Aero Basic doesn’t?
They even went as far to show us a per-pixel image of the new theme:
I was actually surprised at how in-depth they got with the whole subject. Now that they actually explained all of their reasoning then I guess I won’t be questioning as much why they couldn’t find some way to make the Basic theme look more like the Aero one. 
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That picture is cool – it’s surprising to think that they’d actually go into that much detail when doing a design; or maybe they were just using it to shut the mouths of the nay-sayers.
Ok Ryan, where did you get the Graphite theme?
I just looked at Themes and there are only 2, Windows Vista and Windows Classic.
Okay, I guess it actually isn’t a theme. It is more of a color scheme. As long as you can enable the Windows Vista Aero then you are able to change the color scheme to Graphite. Checkout [tech.cybernetnews.com] I took to see what I’m talking about.
Okay, I know of that. However, I have not tried any different colors. I wonder what it takes to build a theme? I guess I will wait for the books to come out after it has gone gold.
I am burning RC2 to install and see if that fixes my Windows Defender update problem.
Yes, I brought my computer with me and have it in my hotel room. I do not yet have a notebook.