So far, I have not seen a downside, though I have not stretched its abilities. The tray menu includes the ‘Open at boot’ option, so it’s not one of those programs that surreptitiously adds itself to the start-up applications.You can reconfigure it on the fly using the tray menu, then store those new preferences.

You can blur things, have translucency, control the use of accent colours in all kinds of dialogs and pop-ups. TranslucentTB offers a whole lot of options.If I maximise the application, it sits above the taskbar like normal, which immediately makes any obscured taskbar icons visible again.The main application window (in this case Firefox) extends into where the taskbar would be, giving me effectively a taller screen.Here is a screenshot of the tray menu for TranslucentTB. You can control a lot more than transparency. It does mean that sometimes a taskbar icon is hard to see against the application GUI behind it, but on balance it’s a definite improvement. By making it translucent, I get a little more screen real estate. I like it because I have a big screen, and most of the taskbar is empty - a few pinned icons on the left, and the time, date etc on the right, and a big gap in between. You know the sort of thing type ‘perf’ the search box (Windows), choose ‘Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows’ and then choose ‘Adjust for best performance’, which is an alias for ‘turn all this cruft off’.Īnyway, despite this I have installed TranslucentTB, which gives you a lot more control over the taskbar. First thing I do with a new Windows (or Linux desktop) install is turn off animations and any visual effect that might use a few CPU cycles I’d rather use for real work. Purely visual things are usually not important to me. I like to keep background processes to a minimum. I don’t like to put stuff in the taskbar menu tray thing.

Install translucenttb