> The thick borders took up valuable screen space and weren’t necessary.ĭefine 'necessary'. This strikes me as very much a 21st century sort of comment, which looks at the 'what' and totally fails to consider the 'why' and the historical context. These widgets came with guidelines for how they should be sized and placed, something which is missing from a lot of modern UI toolkits.
On the other hand, Mac OS 8 came with a fresh batch of standardized widgets (Appearance Manager) which made all the apps look better. I remember the Mac OS 8 era as a bit of “excess” that got cleaned up somewhat with the arrival of Mac OS X. This often meant that controls which were supposed to be visible would be partially covered by another window’s border. Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up window locations with the assumption that the window borders were 1 pixel wide, like they were prior to Mac OS 8. Modern Mac OS X is actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on three sides, and narrower scroll bars.
Try running at a more modest 800圆00 or 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real monitors of the era.
