My last post pointed to an ars technica article titled When in Rome: engineering the Firefox 3 user experience (via Digg) in which Alex Faaborg revealed that the Vista theme for Firefox 3 will not support transparency.  In Vista terms, that transparency is commonly referred to as Vista or Aero “Glass,” and you can read a bit more about it here.

Anyway, I later came across a screenshot (via Twitter) of Firefox 3 very clearly making use of (or at least pretending to) the Vista Glass transparency.  That transparent look comes courtesy of the Glasser extension for Firefox, which is currently “alpha quality,” according to its creator.  The extension can also be seen as the only hope for Firefox 3 users who wish to see the browser blend in with the Vista operating system like Internet Explorer does, since it could be very likely this feature doesn’t make its way into Firefox until version 4.

As an aside, if you like the theme shown in the aforementioned screenshot, you should take a look at Phoenity Aura, which, according to its author, will be compatible with Firefox 3 RC1.

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