Cortana changed color!?
Cortana changed color!?
ah okay, didn't realize you already mentioned that. I've always used dark themes for everything so that's what I was used to. There's an old registry option to change this as well though. Not sure if it still works, but ill post it if I find it. this change started as an A/B test on insider builds, apparently not a lot of people complained about it then so they expanded it to public builds. It wasn't an online update, it locally decided whether it wants to enable/disable the recolour (this was actually added a long time ago, but kept disabled) as part of the A/B test, that's why it changed without any noticeable update. It would've still done it without internet connection. They've posted a ton of concepts for light and dark taskbar themes, so it looks like their eventual plan is to have a system-wide light and dark theme. I agree that changing a single element looks out of place, hopefully they finish the full redesign soon instead of enabling a half-finished change.
Registry update applied: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\Flighting\0\WhiteSearchBox color set to default (dark theme) or https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/7539...-10-a.html for white background).
I could consider trying it if they don't resolve it quickly; hopefully they'll understand and improve soon with enough input.