If I remember correctly, 7 introduced stupid "transparent" UI and removed (or attempted to bury) the color-scheme editor. This is a particularly brain-dead move, because from Windows 3.1 until well into the 2000s you could create your own system-wide color scheme that would be honored by all properly-written applications. So I used a charcoal scheme (what today is trumpeted as "dark") for a decade... but then right before the rest of the planet realized that inverse (white background, black text) color schemes are stupid, Microsoft REMOVED the ability to set up a "dark" one.
Then there is the baffling (and still present) fuckery of the user directories in Explorer. There are all kinds of shadow copies of your user directories that are "forbidden." WHY? WTF is all of that shit?
I think they also removed (or, again, buried) the ability to organize your programs into groups in the Start menu. WTF are they thinking? I want to put all of my graphic-editor apps together. I want to put all of my audio apps together. Then I want another group for my office/productivity apps. But NO! MS thinks I want everything in a giant, disorganized pile. Or I want them organized by VENDOR name. What the ever-loving shit would I want that for?
There are little regressions everywhere. Another one is in Explorer. Originally, Explorer would show + signs next to directories that were not empty. I think it was Windows 7 where they stopped showing those... unless you happened to roll the cursor into the left pane of Explorer; then they would suddenly appear. WHY? Are we supposed to sweep the cursor across every pixel on the screen, looking for hidden goodies? Absolutely retarded.
And eventually MS abandoned the universally-understood + sign in favor of a stupid TRIANGLE to disclose additional contents. The + sign is fucking UNIVERSALLY UNDERSTOOD to mean "additional." WTF is a triangle supposed to mean?
I'm so glad the world has largely moved on from Windows, because it is a disgrace. I'm just bummed because I want to use MS Flight Simulator, but it would require me to buy and set up an expensive Windows system. NO WAY. Looks like X-Plane for me.
> because from Windows 3.1 until well into the 2000s you could create your own system-wide color scheme that would be honored by all properly-written applications
That was possible since the very first Windows version.
I believe you. I just didn't use Windows until 3.1, at least that I remember.
You could also set up system-wide color schemes in Unix GUIs. Only the vaunted Mac forced a hard-coded inverse color scheme on people for what, 30 years?
I mentioned this at WWDC in a user-experience forum in the mid-2000s, asking why we couldn't have user-defined color schemes on the Mac. You should have heard the whining and moaning from the Mac programmers, who no doubt considered themselves "elite" compared to Windows programmers. It was pretty pathetic. All Apple had to do was create a proper system of color registers during the transition to OS X. But nope. They hard-coded color names into the UI. Amateur hour.
I'm not shocked that the transition to even another hard-coded color scheme has suffered from problems; particularly on iOS, in Apple's own controls. But the fact that every app developer still has to manually cater to a klugey color-scheming system in the UI is embarrassing.
