Why would Microsoft remove the beautiful Aero Glass effect and replace it with flat colors and cheesy translucency?

Hi,

Thank you for your feedback.  Now is the time to voice it so it gets heard by Microsoft.  It may take some time before any "changes" will be made but it will be heard.

As for why Aero is being removed, the reasoning is probably twofold. First, while the Desktop paradigm can never be shoehorned into a Metro-style touch-friendly interface, these changes definitely go some way towards unifying the Desktop design with the Metro Start Screen and apps, Windows Phone 7, and the Xbox. The second answer is much more direct: Microsoft is simply trying to save on CPU and GPU cycles, thus making Windows 8 devices faster and more power efficient. All of those drop shadows and transparencies add a significant resource overhead to Windows Vista and 7, which is OK for a high-power desktop computer, but crippling on a laptop, netbook, or tablet

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/129620-windows-8-kills-off-dated-and-cheesy-aero

Paul Thurrott, over at his blog Supersite for Windows, argues that Microsoft is getting rid of Aero to save battery life.

“Aero, with all its glassy, translucent goodness, is bad for battery life. Metro, meanwhile, which is flat, dull, not transparent, and only full screen, is very good for battery life. It’s predictable,” he writes.

And battery life matters much more to the on-the-go tablet or laptop user, not the always-plugged-in desktop user. According to Thurrot, Microsoft no longer cares about its traditional desktop user base and has ditched Aero in order to cater to a “mythical” tablet user.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/microsoft-drops-aero-glass-ui-in-windows-8/

Enable Hidden Aero Lite Theme In Windows 8 For (Slightly) Improved Performance

http://www.redmondpie.com/enable-hidden-aero-lite-theme-in-windows-8-for-slightly-improved-performance/

Just an assumption, Sinofsky and a few morons next to him just removed it, anther assumption someone lost a bet, or medicinal marihuana, or just for fun, or maybe for pure stupidity.

I am unable to think of more logical reasons.

Same here, I don't really like the new theme that much of windows 8, the glass aero theme in vista/7 was good I have no idea why the removed it. Couldn't they have just put both themes?

Although beta versions of Windows 8 used an updated version of Aero Glass with a flatter, squared look, Aero Glass is no longer the default theme on Windows 8, as Microsoft developers felt that interface designs imitating natural materials were becoming dated. Instead, the desktop interface incorporates elements of the new Metro design, which uses a flatter look with fewer transparency effects, solid colored window borders (designed to attract more attention to the content of a window), and fewer rounded edges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

Aero Theme is Bad, Disable It

http://www.petri.co.il/vista_aero_performance_issues.htm

It was  resource intensive for the most part.

Natural look is dated?  No, the natural look is reality.  The flat look, with no depth or shadows or translucency is like... 1990's, Windows 95, 16-color dated.  That's how windows 8 looks to me.

The Aero Glass theme is the most modern, most beautiful theme I've ever seen on any OS ever.  Even the wild KDE Desktop themes and effects are cheesy compared to Aero Glass.  Glass looked sophisticated compared to the others, especially with the parallax of the glare effects when moving windows.

I'm a developer, and I've designed game engines.  I know all about performance.  Switching to a pre-rendered desktop (a.k.a. desktop composition) was a very smart and long-awaited move (Apple had it for a decade prior, based on my experience viewing their smooth window animation when I was in Jr. High (I'm almost 30 now).  This composition including the glass blend shader effects can easily be offloaded to the GPU, so this imaginary performance hit is ridiculous.  If there were inefficiencies, they could have been improved.  Finally, there was no reason to not make it available.  There is no reason the start screen couldn't have been a giant full-screen glass panel.

The Windows 8 start menu was old-news to me, considering I invented it back in 2003 when I was still an undergrad.  In my graduate work, I formalized the design with "scenario-based design" methodology and presented it to my class, as well as to Lockheed Martin in 2007 (who incidentally wanted to patent it, but I wouldn't let them, explaining that I had already shown it to many people and wanted it to be free).  It came complete with a full-screen display of icons (based on what was in your quicklaunch folder) that could be expanded in width to display additional information about each shortcut.  I used the F8 key with a global hook to activate it (since I couldn't hook the Windows key in Win XP), and to start a search, all you had to do was start typing.  After each letter typed, it would refilter the matching icons, by looking for the letter sequence anywhere with the shortcut name, filename, or shortcut description, so that typing "IM" would match "AIM" as well as "GIMP".  After each re-filtering, the non-matching icons would smoothly fade out in place, and the remaining icons would smoothly animate to regroup, in order, in the center of the display.  I have this all documented and graded long before Windows Vista even arrived, and even presented it at Lockheed Martin in 2007 as I said.  So as far as I'm concerned, Windows 8's start screen is nice, but it actually botches the idea I came up with long before.  If you read my scenario-based design specification (a formal specification from Authors at PSU which I adopted for my design), it details exactly why every aspect of this full-screen tile system with morphing "live" icons is most efficient, as well as more suitable for a touch display.  But again, Windows 8 got the details wrong, so it's not that great or usable.  For example, in my system, the icons remained in the same places so that your spacial memory could allow you to quickly touch the same spot every time at a given resolution.  It supported scrolling as well as page up/down, so you could skip pages and still touch in the same spot from memory.  Anyway, I'm glad they at least moved in that (obvious) direction, but I've demonstrated and reasoned that it could be done much better.  Nice try.

Bottom line, removing a feature does not count as a performance improvement.  How about removing the entire OS, that would free up a lot of processor cycles!  No.  The Glass effect was important.  The blurring was functional and aesthetically pleasing and calming.  I have zero interest in Windows 8 at this point.