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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

It's ironic to me after being universally panned for years with their own browsers, Microsoft is making such leaps and bounds of improvement to Google's browser, to the point that even Google wants to bring it back upstream.

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I always get a kick out of how modern design has decided to finally coalesced on a hybrid of Watercolor XP and Encarta 2000. Microsoft could have just stick with that and saved 2 decades of redesigns, but then XP/OSX came out with everything covered in shiny plastic. Oh Luna/Aqua how you set us back. The lost decades.

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/2007/04/forgotten-wind...

http://www.shoplack.com/detail.aspx?id=1305

It really is remarkable how far ahead of it's time Watercolor really was, and then they just killed it.

In an alternate timeline, they used watercolor and now XP-style guis are in fashion.

If they had a consistent gray/white/tan everywhere, and modern icons, it would look en vogue today.

https://www.deviantart.com/rainingskies/art/Windows-Whistler...

Imagine that with these, something they absolutely could have accomplished at the time. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/20/21146028/microsoft-window...

Watercolor was my favorite XP theme! I would never have remembered it if not for seeing it mentioned here. I used to find it elegant compared to other themes.

On the Linux side, my favorite theme was Red Hat's Bluecurve. People still port it to modern DEs, and it still looks good. I think it was ahead of its time, but it never really caught on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve

https://cn.pling.com/img/hive/content-pre1/148927-1.png

My teenage self spent a significant amount of time using custom-made Windows XP theme ("Visual Style") (by hacking UXTheme.dll ; me being an ignorant teenager I probably followed this guide [1] ).

Most of them were gaudy [2] but some of theme I still find attractive even nowadays [3][4].

[1] https://lifehacker.com/how-to-use-custom-windows-visual-styl...

[2] https://www.deviantart.com/unr3al/art/Classix-10k-2-1883531

[3] https://www.deviantart.com/fugacious/art/HmmXP-2-0-1-5514034

[4] https://www.deviantart.com/b0se/art/Codename-Opus-3-0-924039...

There was also the never released Royale Noir, Royale Blue, Embedded, and Zune themes, which were even signed and didnt need uxtheme.dll patched.

https://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/

https://www.askvg.com/download-official-windows-xp-themes-no...

Watercolor was a fantastic theme. I've been a Mac guy since birth, but at the time I used a Watercolor theme on my Mac because it was just that nice

This is exactly what I hoped would happen when they said they were switching engine—because Chrome was just so bad on Windows in quite a few ways. I’m still not sold on some aspects of it, thinking legacy Edge styling was better, but it’s a vast improvement that feels much closer to native and proper. New Edge actually feels quite decent.

Now I just want the text rendering fixed the rest of the way, because Chrome’s is still poor in nativeness (though again Edge has already improved it further).

> It's ironic to me after being universally panned for years with their own browsers, Microsoft is making such leaps and bounds of improvement to Google's browser, to the point that even Google wants to bring it back upstream.

Yes, what a crazy world we live in that Microsoft didn't start collaborating on Chromium by implementing stuff no one wanted to land.

I'm not sure what this comment is getting at. Why would it be surprising that Edge engineering would make real contributions?

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