Glass tab bar in Opera

Since the advent of Google Chrome, a lot of small details in the appearance of browsers caught my attention. One of them was the loss of the window title and the use of a glass row with tabs, which fits very well with the Vista / Win7 Aero style.

Recently, Safari 4 also copied this format.


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And finally, we got to the opera ...
I have been using Opera for more than 6 years, and I am impressed with the achievements in recent builds. But I (and others) would like to see the glass windows in Opera 10, but with so many new features, it does not seem to me that Aero will be available for the final (in fact, it was promised to Opera 11).

Here is the look of a new skin designed by John Hicks :



The new skin has become very beautiful, and, as noted by AntRepin , it could be even better if you used the glass style in the tab bar.



So I decided to hack the Opera and see if it is possible to turn on transparency ... And to my surprise, I did it (the solution is not perfect, since it is only a hack made in a couple of hours), with a very good result:



Moreover, I decided to combine this hack with my previous hack, which removes the header line. Here's what I got:



Hopefully ... I hope that this will be implemented very soon by the Opera development team.

For those who would like to see live results, I posted them on Rapidshare and MediaFire:

Download hack for Opera (Rapidshare)
Download hack for Opera (MediaFire)

This is a modified skin (with a black background line of tabs that will be replaced with glass after a hack). You need to copy it to the Path \ Before \ Opera \ Skin \ folder and select Tools -> Appearance in the menu ...

After that, you need to run the OperaAero.exe program (it will create a tray icon with which you can close it).

To remove the window's window header, place windowstyle.exe directly into the root of the D: \ drive, then open buttons.html in Opera and click the links to add window control buttons to the toolbar.
Note: In fact, the original article said “to the root of the C: \ drive,” but the path D: \ windowstyle.exe is hard-coded in the buttons.html file. I think nothing bad will happen if you correct it to your convenience and place the file there.

If you did everything right, you can enjoy the result.

This should also work with a row of tabs located below or to the left and to the right, although the arrangement to the left and to the right looks awful with this hack.

And, finally, my congratulations to the Opera team for the great work that has already done to make Opera my favorite browser long ago!