@Zemm said:
I set my modern browser background to grey. I like the old-school look. Really shows the WTF websites that don't bother to set it, even though they assume it's white.
I've set the "window" background colour (whatever that means) in XP to ultra dark teal (kind of like backlight bleed, but teal instead of purple) – this is used for text/list controls, Explorer windows, Notepad etc. It's funny how many sites set only the foreground colour or only the background colour in an HTML text control, assuming that everyone has black text on a white background set by default. HTML e-mails also assume a non-existent white background that they don't get as a result of the client using the window background colour.
Maybe the reason Microsoft have been gradually removing the degree of control that users have over the system colours is that the granularity was always too poor to be genuinely useful. Word 2003 for example uses the window background colour for the paper colour – should Word show paper as white, or should it disregard real-world colours in favour of the system theme colours? Depends on your reasons for setting the colours ... I just have my home PC in "angry" colours. I tried all-black at work, but I was hitting too many programs and websites that messed up colour assignment.
Windows 7 can't even cope with dark title bar colours as it's too stupid to permit white caption text in Aero Glass, so you get black-on-filthy-smudge window titles. Maybe that's why some programs gave up with window titles altogether ;-)