Comment 27 for bug 733233

Paul,

That could work. But if we're recalculating every time the window's content changes that would likely (1) cost many cycles and (2) be very distracting.

Hopefully these screenshots demonstrate that a simple mid-grey shadow works well: it provides good visual contrast if the window and background don't already contrast; but it looks subtle if there's already plenty of contrast.

In particular, look at the bottom-right of the Banshee window on this new screenshot—the shadow's only visible at the black-on-black edge.

Notably, it still looks like a shadow in the usual case of a light background. The only case where this fails to ensure contrast is a mid-grey window on a mid-grey background. None of our default UI is mid-grey.