General Q&A

Agreed on Vivaldi, I jumped from Waterfox to Vivaldi mostly because I randomly stumbled on a post where they were testing out themes with custom icons and couple of those were retro themed Windows 95 like and Windows xp like, I am using the Win95 one and it looks pretty cool.

themes.vivaldi.net/themes/x3WlOeREJGY

themes.vivaldi.net/themes/PBylqOyDJr5

Hello. I am happy to find this forum. I didn't expect that so many people like good old classic theme.

Recently I had to upgrade to Windows 10 and now struggle with its dumb UI. But I don't want to solve a complex task of returning UI to Win7 classic completely. I just need an ergonomic UI for my tasks. I need to easily see that program is active/inactive on taskbar and by its title (ideally with classic Win7 gradient). I also need to have classic thin gray borders around windows. So it is ok for me to have new window button style, to keep new file explorer as it is and so on.

I tried RetroBar for the taskbar. It is quite good for me and I like that is doesn't join together same tasks like 2 Chrome windows. But has some issues:
  - no system context menu for tasks
  - notification bar is too condensed
  - Win 10 desktop programs list icon doesn't exist there
  - no calendar on time icon click
  - order of icons is not adjustable and not stable
  - it also has WinXP style and I get used to Win7 style of buttons.
  - it would be nice to have Win10 task button notifications but it is optional.
Anyway it is quite usable now.
I also used ClassicShell but did not restored it yet in Win 10, just want to give a change to standard Win 10 start menu and its features.

As for window titles When I change accent color to blue, I see ugly blue window borders so I've set accent color as light gray but it made active and inactive windows look the same and all labels in settings windows are gray on white, so hardly readable. I actually don't understand how MS expected to made everything readable with a single accent color. Even their accent preview dialog for any accent color gives 4 variants some of which are always unreadable.

When I choose "Enable colored title bars" in Winaero Tweaker I see correct window titles but windows are without borders at all and it makes it hard to resize. I would wish to keep a thin gray border.

So my question is if there is some easy solutions for that like editing a theme or some tweaks? I worry about modifying system files and making any low-level changes because I need my computer for work, so it should be stable and I need standard windows components be unchanged.

Thank you but unfortunately that is not what I need.
1. It is a tutorial for Win 11 and I have Win 10.
2. It requires many system changes, modifies Explorer look which I wish to avoid.
3. The result doesn't look good to me. Taskbar has Win 10/11 underlines instead of buttons. Also underline just indicates open window, not window with active keyboard focus.

1. Great.
2. Ok, thank you. It would be cool to see this in tutorial as it is not clear what changes are required for a new look and what are mandatory.
3. I'll try to learn how to implement it partly and I'll probably keep RetroBar for task bar solution (maybe I will contribute to is as I am a programmer but not sure I'll find time for that). I saw TaskBow site but didn't get from the screenshots that it has classic theme. There are only multicolor styles. If it has classic theme I'll try it.

As for active windows I just mean usual active windows with blue header background (like the one in this forum). When I have many windows open and type something on the keyboard input goes to the active window. I used to it and when I see gray window background it makes me think that window is not active and switch it. From what I could understand, I can either remove a border and use active/inactive titles or have window borders and set some accent color which will be applied to both active and inactive window's titles and also to window border. So I made it gray and border looks good but header is always gray. No way to have different color for active and inactive window title and gray color for window borders. Changes in registry don't change anything in this case.

Update: I tried TaskBow and in my system it looks corrupted, no bottons, no classic taskbar look at all, some black icons in settings. I would better keep RestroBar.

For Taskbow, it needs to be configured properly. I will detail that tomorrow. The result is not perfect, but it works.
Regarding the active windows, I understand better. Are you talking about windows with the classic theme or without the classic theme ?

I am talking about the current Win 10 windows without any software tweaks. I hoped to slightly modify it without low-level system modification to 1) have gray borders; 2) have blue background for active windows. But probably it is not possible.

That's great, thank you. I need to try it.

So, I've been thinking that maybe I could use the compatibility feature that Windows 2000 has to run KernelEx and then use Firefox 52 with it. Reason being that Opera 12 and Firefox 12 aren't quite what I need to do what I need. However, the properties section has no compatibility feature, and I haven't been able to work DosBox well enough to use KernelEx with Windows 2000.

Is there a way to enable compatibility in Windows 2000 to use KernelEx?

There's another seperate project for KernelEx on windows 2000 retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2020/04/windows-2000-extended-kernel-30e.html