Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
Windows Classic is dead in Win8
In Windows Developer Preview, Windows Classic theming mode no longer exists, and UX theming mode has been modified to include support for high contrast themes. Also, the system now stores the current visual styles so that they are always available, even when the Themes service is not running. Because of these changes, applications that target only Windows Developer Preview no longer need two separate code paths to support visual styles and high contrast themes.
It’s crazy that the old Windows 95 widget support exists under the hood of every Win OS up to Windows 7. As a developer this presents added work in insuring support, especially in projects like Mozilla, which handle common control theme rendering internally. I can’t believe it’s taken this long for MS to kill Classic off – this is great news. Good F’n riddance!
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