[ama5322]

> This hasn’t been consistent since at least Vista and the release of WPF, which does totally custom control rendering. Circa 2006.

Ignoring 3rd party apps, to me the windows UI died with XP where the consistency stopped being somewhat pushed on the base OS/UX itself.

Strictly speaking nobody cares what APIs are being used or if there are multiple of them as long as they convey a consistent UX. If a consistent UX is pushed on a system level, even custom apps will try to stick to it (see macos).

But the sad truth is that on windows there is no longer one. W10 can show you dialogs from the windows 3.1 style up to a WPA, and you'll likely encounter a mixture all the time because there's no consistency.

I sometimes watch retro hw channels and looking at windows from 3 to 2k reminds me the stark difference.