Mac OS 9.2.2, released in December 2001, is the final release of the classic Mac OS before Apple switched entirely to OS X. Both 9.x and early 10.x shipped concurrently.

This is the desktop. Even though it is still very much the same as previous versions functionality-wise, steps have been made to make it prettier.
The control strip is much more modular. You can now drag tiles straight into the strip instead of having to add them to a folder, and you can remove them by dragging them out while holding Option.

The about window. Windows now have a 3D appearance to them.

As you can see, even though real multitasking does not yet exist, they added in a button in the title bar to “minimize” the window, although in reality all this does is “roll up” the window into the titlebar.

Like previous versions, you can still change colors of icons, and you can do so by going into the file info window, which is under the File menu.

The Finder can browse files in either large icon, small icon, or list views. The list view is automatically sorted by a specific attribute, eg by name.

Mac OS 9 now includes Sherlock 2 for doing file searches. Sherlock can search both locally, and over the internet. Google even has/had a plugin that you could install that allowed Sherlock to search it.