I’ve always firmly believed that the user should have ultimate control over the color, fonts, and overall design of the applications on his system. Not the developer. The developer should just be able to say “this is text” and the OS should respect the user’s chosen text color. The developer should be able to say “this is a window” and the system decides how it’s styled. Every new OS release and every new browser release, we drift farther away from that ideal. If we respected the user’s preferences, we’d have a consistently styled workspace, and all our tools would look and feel like they belonged together.

Handing all of this control over look and feel to developers was a major mistake, and we pay for it over and over by having tools we keep having to re-learn, that look and function slightly differently from each other.