Buried in an 11,000-word tome on the Building Windows 8 blog, user experience honcho Jensen Harris explains that the legacy desktop in Windows 8 will ship with white -- yes, solid white -- window borders, square window edges, buttons that don't glow, no shadows, no transparency (except, apparently, on the taskbar), 2D ribbon icons flat as pancakes, no reflections, and no gradients. Welcome back to Flatland!
At least, those are the defaults. There's no indication whether you'll be able to bring back some color. There's no mention of other Aero features, including Aero Snap, that debuted in Windows Vista and was Microsoft's attempt at the time to introduce a cool, whizzy UI to rival that in Mac OS X. But it's clear that the accoutrements of Aero Glass -- rounded corners, glowing icons, window border transparency, and gradients on buttons -- won't see the light of day in any version of Windows 8. Ignore the fact that this same Microsoft blog has been showing us screenshots of Windows 8 with Aero Glass as recently as two weeks ago.
What we will see is unclear. As the blog explains, "While a few of these visual changes are hinted at in the upcoming release preview, most of them will not yet be publicly available. You'll see them all in the final release of Windows 8." We don't know what's coming, and we won't know what options we'll have until the final version hits.
