Apple's Liquid Glass is Windows Vista done well

It's hard to look at Apple's new "Liquid Glass" aesthetic and not think about Windows Vista, Microsoft's much-maligned OS which also touted transparencies and glass-like effects as a bold new vision for computing. You can see the similarities between Apple's UI and Vista's "Windows Aero" design language everywhere, from the glassified app icons in iOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26 which look a lot like VIsta's glossy icons, to the transparent backgrounds used in drop down menus, which hearken back to VIsta's transparent window borders. The key difference is that Apple is just doing it all better. (Sorry, not sorry, Windows fans.)

While Microsoft started off with an intriguing idea, it failed to execute the Windows Aero UI well in Vista. Mostly, that's because Vista itself was a huge mess — it was far slower than Windows XP, it was notoriously buggy ...