Windows Vista/Aero

Windows Aero is Windows Vista’s preferred user interface, designed to be a cleaner, more powerful, more efficient and more aesthetically pleasing user interface than that of prior versions of Windows. It adds transparency, live thumbnails and icons, animations and general “eye candy” to Windows. It replaces the Luna visual theme used as the default in Windows XP. Aero can only be enabled on computers running the Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate editions; Windows Vista Starter and Home Basic users were invited to upgrade.

Aero Glass

Aero Glass makes window frames (title bars and bottom, left, and right borders) appear semitransparent. Some components of Windows Vista, including the file explorer, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player expand the glass border further into the window. Aero Glass was removed in Windows 8, although the underlying technology remains the same.

Aero Glass is much more complex than it may appear. A color tint, blurring the screen area behind the window, and fixed images are combined to create the glass effect. However, there is very little visual differentiation between the active (frontmost) window and other windows that may be positioned alongside it, leading to the risk of a user accidentally closing the wrong window. The main indicator of the active window was that its Close button was bright red, while it is the same color as the surrounding area in all other windows.

Aero Glass can be customized via a dedicated screen in Control Panel, under Personalization ➪ Window Color and Appearance. Eight alternative color tints are available, as well as a color mixer. The intensity of the glass effect can also be set here, including disabling transparency completely.

Other components

Aero Peek shows small, live taskbar thumbnails when the mouse hovers over a taskbar item.

Aero Shake, available only in Windows 7, minimizes all other windows when a single window is dragged quickly back and forth across the desktop. Performing the gesture again restores the hidden windows.

Aero Snap, available in Windows 7 and later, automatically resizes a window to make it fill the 50% of the vertical screen real estate when dragged to the side of the monitor. Dragging a window to the top of the screen would maximize it, pulling down a maximized window’s title bar will change it back to a floating window. Aero Snap can also be used to make a window expand to fill the desktop vertically (leaving its width unchanged); such windows could be dragged left and right like tiles, or dragged down to restore their original size.

Flip 3D allowed the user to cycle through all open windows and the desktop using a three-dimensional cyclic mechanism, primarily as a way to demonstrate Windows Vista’s graphical prowess. Flip 3D is invoked by holding Windows+Tab; pressing the Tab key again moves to the next window in the stack. The rightmost, bottommost window on the screen (the one that appears topmost) will be brought to the foreground when the Windows key is released. Flip 3D was removed in Windows 8.

Hardware requirements

Aero Glass requires specific video hardware to work, and the requirements were quite demanding for the 2006 market. DirectX 9.0 and Pixel Shader 2 must be implemented in hardware, and the graphics driver must support the Windows Display Driver Model interface. 256MB of dedicated video RAM was also required, although Windows Aero could operate with less (as low as 64MB) if you used a smaller screen resolution. Very few computers on sale at the time Vista was introduced could support this standard because they were manufactured long before Aero Glass and its requirements were announced. However, by the time Windows Vista SP1 was released, almost all graphics cards available on the market were compatible with Aero Glass.

As a historical note, Aero is the only feature in Windows Vista that has these requirements. All other components are usable on a computer that cannot run Aero. Users who were told that they needed a new graphics card to run Windows Vista were misled. Complicating matters, low-end computers at the time often shipped with Windows Vista Home Basic. These systems do not support Aero because of Microsoft’s limitations (to entice you to pay for a more expensive edition and/or computer), even though the graphics cards in those computers were compatible.