Any way to get active window borders back?

Up to v1709 (or 1803, not sure, skipped that one) active windows had a 1px border all around, making it easy to see them.
Example:


From v1809 (or 1803, not sure...) and up the border is gone.
Example:


While activating "accent colors" is a work around, it makes everything ugly and even messes with Chrome's tab bar because it also colors title bars and so on. Shadows are ugly, waste space and not as clearly visible, so that's a no too.

Is there a way to simply get that glorious 1px border back?

Please help a fellow human upgrade his computer and keep it safe. I'm still on 1709 on my main computer because of that alone.

Thanks!

edit: fixing images

danannn said:

Up to v1709 (or 1803, not sure, skipped that one) active windows had a 1px border all around, making it easy to see them.
From v1809 (or 1803, not sure...) and up the border is gone....

....Is there a way to simply get that glorious 1px border back?

I'm on 1903 and I can honestly say I hadn't noticed that the active window lost its 1 pixel border. I had to recreate your example to see. Yes, your right - it's gone. But the reason I hadn't noticed is that in Visual Effects I have 'Show shadows under windows' enabled. Although there's still no 1 pixel border it doesn't matter, the shadow defines the edge of the active window equally well.

With shadows:


Without shadows:

Shadows are ugly, waste space and not as clearly visible, so that's a no too.

Pity, as that seems to be the only viable option now...

Bree said:

[...]
With shadows:

Without shadows:

Pity, as that seems to be the only viable option now...

Yeah, as far as I know, those are the options. If I had to choose, I'd go with accent colors rather than shadows (been using it like that on an 1809 computer).

I'm just hoping someone found a hack to get the border back or something.

... Or I can just keep going with the 1709 until support ends in April 2020.

Thanks!

I bit the bullet and upgraded (fresh install). I'm using shadows for now =/
I would prefer not to use a 3rd party software to get the borders back.

Off topic / rant:
This has got to be the worst Windows upgrade ever for me.

From GPO settings being straight out ignored (example: deactivating smartscreen, but it still runs) to others being simply reverted after I set (example: delivery optimization, disable allow download from other PCs, do not download drivers automatically, etc) with no sign or reason, I now can't trust Microsoft to keep my settings even between patches. Updating Windows is getting traumatic.

OldNewExplorer brings back old pre 180x black borders around explorer windows.

Also gets rid of the digusting ribbon and brings back old file explorer partly :)

Good fix.

Bree said:

I have 'Show shadows under windows' enabled.

This was a nice fix for me, thank you. Not as good as the older borders, but definitely an improvement and makes it better.