Window Border Glassy/Transparency ~ Who was first?

[neu5eeCh]

So... I haven't figured out the right Google search terms to answer this question myself.

Which DE first introduced glassy Window Borders? Was it Windows 7 VISTA? Emerald? Kwin? One often hears the accusation that KDE looks like Windows/Windows looks like KDE. Disclaimer: I don't really care who was first, just curious....

It seems the trend is well away from glassy, given Windows 8, Gnome, Mint, and Ubuntu (sort of), etc...

[lykwydchykyn]

Emerald/Beryl/Compiz was out before Vista (maybe 2005? 2006?), at least in early beta forms. I don't know what Longhorn (Vista's development version) looked like at that point.

Kwin (version 4 -- v3 didn't have compositing) was definitely after Compiz; it wasn't released until 2008, though I don't know how long the compositing aspects were in development before that.

Pretty sure OS X had a compositing desktop before any of them, so really everyone was trying to catch up to Apple in that regard.

[neu5eeCh]

Yeah, okay. Compiz/Emerald was calling it "opacity" and "blur". That's why I couldn't find anything. VISTA "was completed on November 8, 2006, and over the following three months, it was released in stages to computer hardware and software manufacturers, business customers and retail channels. On January 30, 2007, it was released worldwide." ~ Wikipedia

Here's wikipedia's article on Beryl: "Beryl was the project name for the quinnstorm branch of Compiz, announced on September 19, 2006 after Compiz developer Quinn Storm and the development team decided that the fork had come too far from the original Compiz started by Novell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell) (compiz-vanilla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_software))."

This would seem to suggest that Beryl got started around 2005 or 6? I don't know about the blur plugin.