Things being "a waste of screen real estate" was a bigger issue when we only had 1024x768.
Now we have extremely high resolution monitors, and we use that to get really smooth angled lines and anti-aliasing, scaling up the visuals and decreasing the logical DPI, but the lack of a hard edge to grab doesn't get wider when the visuals are scaled up: it's still a single pixel wide.
The 4x3 aspect monitors were bigger. The 16x9 added only horizontal space.
We still need the same "real" size of items in the real world. And there is a trend to occupy the space with useless staff: ribbon, big G logo, status messages not about what you do but about bugs and internal program stucture.
> The 4x3 aspect monitors were bigger. The 16x9 added only horizontal space.
Unless you had a large monitor back then and a small monitor now, this is incredibly incorrect.
Back in the 1024x768 days, most people probably had a 15" monitor. You might have had 17" if you were lucky. Even at 17", that monitor is only 13.6 x 10.2"
Now, People on a 16:9 are likely running a minimum 22". At 16:9, that's 19.2 x 10.8".
...shit you might be right. But really only if you had a large 4:3 monitor and now have a small 16:9 monitor. 4:3 15" is 12 x 9", and 16:9 24" is 20.9 x 11.8. 27" is 23.5 x 13.2.
Laptop screens are of course a different beast. Still though, with resolutions being higher, certainly they could have used a pixel or two to create an actual window edge.
It's pretty much as big an issue now, because my field of view has not gotten any bigger.
And I think you missed the essential part of my comment: The reason it's a waste of screen real estate for me is that there is no need for any edge to grab when I can grab the window anywhere by combining with a keypress.
I have more real estate to "grab" than you can ever get with borders that way, without dedicating any space to it at all.
Now we have extremely high resolution monitors, and we use that to get really smooth angled lines and anti-aliasing, scaling up the visuals and decreasing the logical DPI, but the lack of a hard edge to grab doesn't get wider when the visuals are scaled up: it's still a single pixel wide.