v2.28.0

The panel is glass now

The search panel is no longer a page painted over a blur. It is drawn natively as a pane of glass: what is behind it bends into the edges, the rim picks up light on all four sides, and the whole thing sits above a soft shadow instead of a flat outline. It opens with the panel rather than a beat after it, and the first thing it shows is what is actually behind it right now.

What changed

• The backdrop bends into the edges. Moving the panel over text, a grid or a photo and the material now pulls that content toward the rim instead of just softening it, the way a thick block of glass does. The centre stays a clear window; only the border does the bending. Colour splits slightly at the very edge, and a fine grain keeps large flat areas from banding.
• Edge light on all four sides. The rim highlight used to favour the sides nearest the pointer, so two corners looked lit and two did not. At rest all four edges are equally lit; the light only leans toward the pointer while it is over the panel.
• Rounded corners that survive scaling. The silhouette lives in the surface itself now, so the arcs are anti-aliased instead of stepped, and at 125 % display scaling the panel no longer overflowed its own frame.
• A shadow under the panel. The glass casts a soft contact shadow outward, equal on every side, so it reads as sitting above the desktop rather than pasted onto it.
• It appears with the panel, showing the current backdrop. Opening used to reveal the glass on a frame produced for the search-bar height, so the rows the panel grew into could hold a picture from the last time it was open. The reveal now waits for a frame at the size the panel actually has, and hiding forgets the previous session entirely.
• The bend is there on the first frame. The edge effect used to start flat and finish settling after the panel was already on screen, which read as the effect arriving late. It now opens almost all the way and only settles the last hair.
• The right edge is no longer cut off. Dividers and the scrollbar ran to the panel's edge but the panel's borderless window carries an invisible resize frame, so the last ~8 px of the page were shaved. Everything reaches the edge now.
• Attached-file and PC chips match the rest of the panel. They kept the old pill radius, heavy edge and accent fill; they now use the same 1 px edge, 6 px radius, transparent fill and row inset as the dropdown options and history rows.

Notes

• Nothing changed about what the glass can show: content Windows blocks from being copied (some protected video) still comes through as a flat area, and an HDR monitor still gets a normal-range copy of the screen.
• The glass needs transparency turned on. With transparency off, or if the GPU path cannot start, the panel uses its opaque surface and looks like it did before - that fallback now also kicks in mid-session if the renderer fails, instead of leaving a blank panel.
• The first time the panel opens at a height it has not used since nex started, the glass can take a fraction of a second longer; after that it is immediate. Resizing the panel while typing no longer stalls it either.

Commit Log

• eb58535 release: v2.28.0 native liquid glass panel
• 1f3eb0d merge: glass reveal timing, contact shadow, corner polish
• 453cd03 fix(glass): reveal on a frame for the current panel, and stop rebuilding geometry per show
• 1bcf284 Rework liquid glass material and fix right-edge clipping
• 821f8a1 feat(overlay): ease the panel closed and fall back when glass dies
• 8c19c4e feat(overlay): native liquid glass material for the search overlay
• 74bb3a2 docs: record the idea of web access, skills, and memory in chat
• c7c9df2 style(chat): context chips match the redesigned surfaces