Acrylic title bar

Iron Contributor

Well, actually this is a feature that I'd like to see in the whole OS, but since it existed in the old Edge, I'd love to see it in the Chromium version as well 

47 Replies

@matthewj15 this isn't true acrylic, this is Aero Glass with an acrylic type effect which has been hacked into the core OS, as your explorer window gives away. They won't be able to add true acrylic effects to Edge.

@HotCakeX he won't respond because he knows they can't do it.

@HotCakeX this is the "hack" being used - http://www.glass8.eu/ - but I don't recommend it because it's broken in Windows 10 1909 and tends to screw things up with major update releases. 

@filetrekker1360 


@filetrekker1360 wrote:

@matthewj15 this isn't true acrylic, this is Aero Glass with an acrylic type effect which has been hacked into the core OS, as your explorer window gives away. They won't be able to add true acrylic effects to Edge.


Why not? any technical reasons?

@filetrekker1360 


@filetrekker1360 wrote:

@HotCakeX he won't respond because he knows they can't do it.


if a 3rd party developer can do such thing for a closed source OS like Windows then Microsoft developers should be able to do it too

@filetrekker1360 


@filetrekker1360 wrote:

@HotCakeX this is the "hack" being used - http://www.glass8.eu/ - but I don't recommend it because it's broken in Windows 10 1909 and tends to screw things up with major update releases. 


Oh well I'm on build 2004 (insider)

@HotCakeX I mean, they *could* do it, but it would mean either major changes to Windows itself, which the Edge team have no control over, or to drop support for other operating systems other than Windows 10, or maintain two separate branches of the same browser, which they don't want to do, and the open source nature of Chromium may also play a factor also.

@HotCakeX It's not worth doing, the hack the guy used has more problems than just being a weird hack of Windows 10. It requires you to run Chromium in Windows 7 compatibility mode, resets on close / relaunch, adds ugly black borders to the window frame because of the fact that it's being run in Windows 7 compatibility mode, and also adds an ugly watermark to your desktop unless you pay for it. It's also not true acrylic, just a fake effect which isn't blurry enough or the right colour so it mismatches with the rest of Windows 10 anyway. This is even if you can get it working, and ignoring the fact it'll keep breaking your OS with any major update. It's really not worth doing and is why I say it's not true 'Acrylic', just a cheap acrylic imitation using hacked in Aero Glass to the DWM.

@filetrekker1360 


@filetrekker1360 wrote:

@HotCakeX I mean, they *could* do it, but it would mean either major changes to Windows itself, which the Edge team have no control over, or to drop support for other operating systems other than Windows 10, or maintain two separate branches of the same browser, which they don't want to do, and the open source nature of Chromium may also play a factor also.


source? proof?

 

@filetrekker1360 


@filetrekker1360 wrote:

@HotCakeX It's not worth doing, the hack the guy used has more problems than just being a weird hack of Windows 10. It requires you to run Chromium in Windows 7 compatibility mode, resets on close / relaunch, adds ugly black borders to the window frame because of the fact that it's being run in Windows 7 compatibility mode, and also adds an ugly watermark to your desktop unless you pay for it. It's also not true acrylic, just a fake effect which isn't blurry enough or the right colour so it mismatches with the rest of Windows 10 anyway. This is even if you can get it working, and ignoring the fact it'll keep breaking your OS with any major update. It's really not worth doing and is why I say it's not true 'Acrylic', just a cheap acrylic imitation using hacked in Aero Glass to the DWM.


I don't care about that 3rd party tool.

Microsoft should do it themselves

 

@filetrekker1360 Did it maybe occur that some of us are busy? I saw the deluge of responses in my inbox and I'll add in what I did.

 

Trying to implement acrylic-like effects across all Win32 apps is what I intended to do for my Windows desktop and the best way to do that at the moment is that glass8.eu tool. That program is very buggy and requires attention with every major Windows update, however the community for the hack has been able to make scripts to fix certain error messages that have popped up. It essentially requires you to stay on the same version of Windows 10 for extended periods of time. I have moved from c. 1803 to 1903 directly and I'm okay with not staying on pace with what Microsoft releases. 

 

In terms of applying the program, it does require intensive setup procedures and troubleshooting with initial installs and it does have that ugly watermark. I'm personally a big fan of the Windows 7 interface, so I donated ~$5 to the guy running the project. The hack is totally at your own risk and it is a good implementation, in my opinion, of a way to apply Acrylic-like effects. There are multiple registry flags available for the hack to change various aspects of the transparency effects, so you can tweak it as you wish. It also has options to change how the background transparency works. Once you do needed tweaks, the program has been quite stable in my usage. I have been using it since the developer started with making it for Windows 8.1 and I find is not great, good -- but adequate.

 

What I did to make it apply in Chromium Edge was apply the flag --disable-windows10-custom-titlebar to the end of the Google Chrome executable shortcut. I didn't run it in compatibility mode. The same flag works in Google Chrome.

 

It would be great for Microsoft to implement true acrylic into Win32 since it would provide true UI uniformity across Windows and I believe they would have the technical knowhow to modify the title bar to allow recent Win32 apps to hook into Desktop Window Manager to let such effects occur. 

The new version of Edge is based on Chromium, which is written in C and C++, Acrylic effects can't be used in native C++ codebases, your source here, from the horses mouth - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/dotnet/mixed-native-and-managed-assemblies?redirectedfrom=MSDN&...

As others have mentioned, there are some ways to cross into other Windows 10 languages to possibly enable acrylic effects in a predominately C++ app, but it requires a significant rewrite and will break compatibility with other operating systems, whereas currently, they can maintain one codebase and compile for whatever they like.

@matthewj15 I wasn't really looking for a response from you either way, sorry if you felt I did. I was merely explaining how you did it - which, by the way, I was right, so my comment still stands, it's not true Acrylic. I did experiment with the --disable-windows10-custom-titlebar flag but it seems to have been removed or disabled somehow in the recent beta branch at least, so I couldn't get that to even work.

@filetrekker1360 It seems to still work for me.ctx29019.png

Personally, I think a better way to go would be not a transparent title bar but rather a design like Safari on macOS where the entire top browser chrome shows part of the website underneath (the Microsoft Store app also does this). The problem with transparent title bars is that they can get ugly depending on what's underneath (I'm looking at you, OneNote under old Edge).

@filetrekker1360 

 

Spoiler

@filetrekker1360 wrote:
The new version of Edge is based on Chromium, which is written in C and C++, Acrylic effects can't be used in native C++ codebases, your source here, from the horses mouth - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/dotnet/mixed-native-and-managed-assemblies?redirectedfrom=MSDN&...

As others have mentioned, there are some ways to cross into other Windows 10 languages to possibly enable acrylic effects in a predominately C++ app, but it requires a significant rewrite and will break compatibility with other operating systems, whereas currently, they can maintain one codebase and compile for whatever they like.

 

 

"Acrylic effects can't be used in native C++ codebases"

source for that statement.

It looks nice
Does Edge classic's title bar get ugly depending on what's underneath?
any example of contents that can maybe it ugly?
I found OneNote's purple under Edge in dark mode a rather unpleasant combination.

@adrianghc 


@adrianghc wrote:
I found OneNote's purple under Edge in dark mode a rather unpleasant combination.

What, this?

 

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