Proving earlier reports and insider information about test builds correct, Microsoft has officially announced that it is retiring the "blue" part of the iconic Blue Screen of Death, as Windows 11 users can expect the critical error screen to resemble the red door from The Rolling Stones' hit – as in, painted black – in the near future.
According to the company's latest blog post, they're introducing a simplified user interface for the critical error screen, designed to reduce downtime during a crash to about two seconds for most users. The new UI, Microsoft says, "improves readability and aligns better with Windows 11 design principles, while preserving the technical information on the screen for when it is needed."
While that's all well and good, the change that attracted the most attention was not the improved readability but rather the shift in the screen's color palette from blue to black, raising questions about why the change was necessary and how exactly the Blue Screen of Death no longer aligned with "Windows 11 design principles" after existing in some shade of blue for nearly 40 years, since the original version of Windows launched back in 1985.
Behold, here's Windows 11's new BSoD (at least we can still call it BSoD):
As stated by the company, the new UI for "unexpected restarts" – sorry, can't help but put Microsoft's corpo wording for crashes and critical errors in quotation marks – can be expected to roll out sometime this summer on all Windows 11, version 24H2 devices. You can check out the full blog post to find out more.
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