> wonder why we didn't have the modern, flat, solid color designs that are fashionable today back then.

I really, really, dislike the modern flat colour designs of today. They make it much harder for me to separate out what I care about, like context and information, because my eyesight isn't perfect.

Gradients made it so much easier for me to see the difference between a tab and the bar it's sitting in. A little strip of colour or some shadowing, to denote the active tab just disappears for me.

I'd rather have flat colors for background elements and bevels for "active" UI elements like buttons and checkboxes. NEXTSTEP-derived UIs (like Windows 9x) were razor sharp and easy to read... and it's funny how futuristic cyberpunk UIs, like the non-VR interfaces featured in Johnny Mnemonic, were envisaged as being more of the same -- maybe a drop shadow or marble texture on the beveled button -- instead of the indistinct flat-shaded hellscape of today.

Those little strips of color don't need to be shaded, though. You could do what Windows XP did with tabs—highlighting them by running a line of bright shining highlight color along the top (e.g. https://www.techrepublic.com/a/hub/i/2008/11/19/b8ad3817-c3b...).

(I'm sure there are even better examples of this "no gradients, but strong color contrast" effect among the various Linux Desktop Environment themes, but I'm not too familiar with them. Paging anyone from /r/unixporn.)

I can't see that little line of colour. What XP does with tabs, by making the active tab flat and the rest gradients, is exactly why I can see it.

Give me contrast by using a mix of gradients and flat, any day.

Presuming the active tab is flat white either way; what's the difference in legibility between the inactive tabs being gradiented white-to-grey (the XP Windows controls style) vs. inactive tabs just being flat grey (the "modern UI" e.g. Google Chrome style)?

I would note that Windows XP also had a high-contrast theme; and that, when enabled, inactive tabs actually lose the distinction in background color from active tabs. But they keep the highlight stripe.

Gradients are higher contrast than flat colours.

To try and put it another way, imagine, for a moment, that you are incapable of perceiving edges. Every single one of your flat tabs now looks like the same part of the same blob.

Now, realise that for a pretty high number of low-vision people, that is reality. The slight blur we experience makes most edges disappear.

(WinXP's high contrast overcame this by tripling the size of all edges).

Wouldn't the inactive flat tabs all still end up looking like one continuous blob either way? The gradient on the inactive tabs in the image I linked is a top-to-bottom gradient; it does nothing to enhance the visibility of the edges between contiguous inactive tabs.

However, the most important piece of information, the _active tab_ is easily discernible.

Switching tab is easy enough, by clicking the centre of its label. When you wish to switch tab, you generally are going to read the label.

But when working out where you are, that can be total guesswork.

>and wonder why we didn't have the modern, flat, solid color designs that are fashionable today back then.

A lot of UI design on computers of the era was flat colors, maybe with a mild gradient. Go look up screenshots from Windows 3.1. Everything is flat grey or white. Windows 9x wasn't really much better, except it had that ugly solid teal background.

Also, dithering on a CRT produced a very different effect from dithering on a high-res LCD.

IIRC the color gradients only started to appear once PCs which could display "True-Color" (or at least "High-Color") modes were widespread enough. The original Windows 95 definitely didn't use them yet.

And the "modern flat solid color designs" still use stuff like subtle shadows and transparencies that would have been either impossible or wouldn't have looked nice in the nineties...